Little Simz – Loud And Quiet 147

Danny L Harle, G.S. Schray, LUMP, Tim Reaper, Cola Boyy, Space Afrika, Wu-Lu, Greentea Peng, John FM, For Breakfast, What’s next for Britain’s DIY music scene?, and more

issue 147

LITTLE SIMZ No need to shout

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 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, Isabel Crabtree, Ian Roebuck, Jamie Haworth, Jess Wrigglesworth, Jemima Skala, Jenessa Williams, Jess Wrigglesworth, Jo Higgs, Joe Goggins, Katie Beswick, Katie Cutforth, Liam Konemann, Lisa Busby, Max Pilley, Megan Wallace, Mike Vinti, Ollie Rankine, Oskar Jeff, Robert Davidson, Reef Younis, Sam Reid, Sam Walton, Skye Butchard, Sophia Powell, Steph Phillips, Susan Darlington, Tara Joshi, Tom Critten, Tristan Gatward, Woody Delaney, Zara Hedderman.

Issue 147

In April of last year, in full panic mode, we asked our readers to support what we do by subscribing to the magazine rather than relying on picking up a free copy when they could. The response was overwhelming, and is why we’re still here, but with those subscriptions due for renewal this month, with everyone’s circumstances constantly changing, we knew we had to adapt again. A whole new membership program is now in place, where you can also opt to pay per month and cancel anytime, and gain access to a new Members Lounge on our site. For your consideration at loudandquiet.com.

Thank you very much.

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, Jake Kenny, Jenna Foxton, Jody Evans, Jonangelo Molinari, Levi Mandel, Matilda Hill-Jenkins, Nathanael Turner, Nathaniel Wood, Oliver Halstead, Phil Sharp, Sonny McCartney, Sophie Barloc, Timothy Cochrane, Tom Porter.

With special thanks to Alex @ In House, Becca McLeish, Chris Cuff , Iris Herscovici, Jon Lawerence, Jon Wilkinson, Keong Woo, Mitch Stevens, Nisa Kelly, Tom Adcock, Will Laurence.

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

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

Tim Reaper . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Wu-Lu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

G.S. Schray . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

John FM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Cola Boyy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

For Breakfast . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Greentea Peng . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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

Little Simz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

UK DIY after the Pandemic . . . .

U2’s digital fly tip of 2014 . . . . .

LUMP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Space Afrika . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Danny L Harle . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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10 12 16 20 22 26 30 35 52 60 66 68 74 78

The Beginning: Previously

Since the last edition of Loud And Quiet

Daughters of Reykjavik When Icelandic hip-hop collective Daughters of Reykjavík released their latest album Soft Spot in 2020, it came with an accompanying podcast, where the group discussed the themes of each song on the album, one track at a time. After five episodes, listeners might have wondered what had happened to the remaining five tracks they hadn’t covered. Those initial episodes turned out to be part one of the project, with part two surfacing online last month – not as a podcast like before, but as a TV show on the group’s YouTube channel. The format is similar: each episode features members of DoR in candid conversation

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discussing the core of a different Soft Spot track (female friendship on ‘DTR’; aggression on ‘A Song to Kill Boys To’, and so on), and each time they’re joined by a guest offering the insight of an outsider (podcast guests included IDER and Erika de Casier; YouTube episodes feature Dream Wife and MAMMÚT). With the benefit of added visuals, each episode now also features a live version of the track in question, performed by the group, and a live set from their guest, where possible (those overseas share videos). All episodes are now available across podcasts and YouTube.

The Beginning: Previously Faith in Strangers The regeneration of Margate continues to kick on with little regard for obstacles thrown down by a year of Covid, with the opening of a new music venue and arts space called Faith in Strangers. A few blocks away from Pete Doherty’s creepy B&B (called, what else, but The Albion Rooms), Faith in Strangers is an airier, more modern space, with panoramic sea views for daytime hot-desking, sunset DJ sets and a 350-capacity gig venue. The space is also rigged up with a ton of cameras, allowing it to double up as a broadcasting centre, allowing its forthcoming program of music and visual art to reach far beyond the local area. faithinstrangers.co.uk

Visions East London’s community-minded festival Visions has announced that it will hold this year’s event (its eighth edition), on August 7. Focusing on new British artists for obvious reasons, the lineup already features Billy Nomates, Caroline, Flohio, Yard Act, Porridge Radio, Gaika, Martha Skye Murphy, Girl Ray and – featured on page 12 of this issue – Wu-Lu, to name but a few. To keep things safe, the event will be operating at a reduced capacity across three neighbouring venues in Hackney (Oval Space, Canvas and Pickle Factory), so watch those tickets fly. And here’s hoping the annual Visions dog show will be able to return too. visionsfestival.com

NTS at 10 From April 19-23, all-conquering internet radio station NTS celebrated 10 years with a collection of daily broadcasts from some very special guests, including My Bloody Valentine, Laurie Anderson, Mica Levi, Arca and Simpsons creator (and leftfield music nerd) Matt Groening. Listen back to these typically weird and wonderful shows (Theo Parrish’s was 6 hours long and called ‘eargoggles’) on the NTS site by searching ‘NTS 10’. nts.live

101 Part Time Jobs Half of all podcasts ever made don’t make it past 14 episodes.

But presenter and journalist Giles Bidder baked his target into the name of his podcast – 101 Part Time Jobs. Since 2018 he’s been speaking with musicians about what jobs they’ve had (and have) to support their creative careers. To celebrate reaching the show’s 101st episode, an illustrated coffee table book has been published (limited to 101 copies of course), featuring excerpts from Thurston Moore, IDLES, Mountain Goats and more, with artwork by Jono Ganz. The podcast bounds on, past episode 101, available on all players. 101parttimejobspodcast.bigcartel.com

Young Turks On April 7, Young Turks (the independent label that’s home to The xx, Sampha and FKA Twigs) changed their name to Young.

In a post on the label’s Instagram page, founder Caius Pawson explained how the Rod Stewart song ‘Young Turks’ (a track evoking the solidarity of youth) had been his source of inspiration when forming the label in 2005. The company has since learned of a group who went by the same name who carried out the Armenian Genocide during the First World War. “Through ongoing conversations and messages that have developed our own knowledge around the subject, it’s become apparent that the name is a source of hurt and confusion for people,” said Pawson.

“We have always tried to affect positive change and knowing what we do now, it’s only right that we change our name.”

BEAUTIFUL by Sherelle DJ and Reprezent radio presenter Sherelle has launched a platform for cultivating new electronic music and scenes within the Black and LGBTQI+ community. It’s called BEAUTIFUL and will include a label, workshops, a focus on ownership and “will be looking to own clubs globally that prioritise Black, LGBTQI+ nights and culture,” says Sherelle, who already co-runs leftfield club label Hooversound alongside fellow Reprezent DJ NAINA. “It’s actually long being a Black queer women in the electronic music scene,” says Sherelle. “SO much energy is needed to exist.

It can have the parallels of being super rewarding and also super exhausting.” The project’s first release will be a compilation of European and British artists. @thisisbeautifulmusic on Instagram

illustration by kate prior

Carbon negative labels A couple of days before Earth Day (April 22), independent labels Ninja Tune and Beggars (the biggest indie group in the world, consisting of 4AD, Rough Trade, Matador, XL and Young) announced their plans to become not carbon neutral, but carbon negative, in an impressively short amount of time. Between the two, their initiatives against climate change include switching their London offices to renewable energy systems, shipping via sea freight, pressing vinyl on 140g rather than the usual 180g, not owning or operating vehicles, and using only recycled card for packaging (Ninja Tune stopped using plastic CD cases way back in 2008). Beggars aims to be carbon negative by the end of 2022 in the UK (and 2024 in the US), while Ninja Tune are hoping to get it done by the end of this year. The UK’s net-zero target, meanwhile, is 2050.

Midnight Chats Series 11 of our very own podcast, Midnight Chats, is currently at its halfway point. Guests rambling on with us this time around, about music, life and the recurring spectre of Lou Reed, have so far included St Vincent, Stuart Braithwaite, Lucy Dacus, Peaches and Soulwax, with more to come every Tuesday night at 00:00 on whichever podcast app you get along with best. All episodes are also available on our site. loudandquiet.com

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The Beginning: <1000 Club

Some streams mean more

In this issue’s conversation with Danny L Harle, we spoke about the power of the internet to completely dislocate you from a living culture that you’re experiencing from afar. You might stumble upon a song that’s come from a small music community that took years to cultivate. This song is soaked in history and meaningful references, and you’ve absolutely no context for what you’re listening to. That’s always been a factor with an art form as allconsuming and fast moving as popular music, but the instantaneous nature of the internet intensifies it.

As a sheltered kid in the Highlands, I remember feeling an intense affinity for house tracks I’d findon Soundcloud circa 2011.

I’d never been to a club. I didn’t have any idea how mixing worked.

That dislocation from the culture was sort of exciting, then, but after years of nerdy, obsessive listening and time slowly grasping the history, while finding essential albums like DJ Sprinkles’ Midtown 120 Blues, it became clear that this music was formed out of living, breathing, often heavily exploited communities.

That exploitation by corporate interests hits independent electronic music from all angles, including in the form of streaming revenue. It’s why the Berlin-based electronic musician Skee Mask decided not to drop his fantastic new record, Pool, on Spotify or Apple Music. A new piece by Ted Hastings in Clash explored the current streaming situation for electronic music, reaching a particularly brutal conclusion: “It’s hard to decipher who this benefits besides the casual listener who wants to listen to a ‘chill’ sequence while they answer their morning emails, and the top tier of high-earning artists who don’t really need any more money. Sure, your music might get added to a playlist, and it will get streamed a whole bunch of times, but if the listener isn’t actually paying attention to what’s playing, does it even really matter?”

On the other side of the world, underground club producers in New York are facing their own battle with streaming, and it makes the dislocating nature of a ‘vibe’ playlist even more clear.

The act I’m recommending this month is El Blanco Niño, aka Christian Vargas, a brilliant artist at the heart of New York’s underground club scene. His discography is made up of giddy club edits, restless house tracks and loosies dropped on Bandcamp straight from the hard drive. Some of the most exciting and daring of these are uploaded under a different spelling of the word

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‘freebies’, like a draft edit you make to avoid duplicating a title.

This unfiltered bootleg approach is what the culture is built on, with unofficial edits being traded around and riffed on for the fun of it. Like AceMoMa, Kush Jones and DJ Swisha (who he has collaborated with on ‘Liquid Trak’), he works at a breakneck pace. You get the sense that there could be dozens of tracks floating about on the internet that we don’t know about.

Vargas is a dextrous producer, able to move between high energy juke and footwork to squelchy acid lines and reggaeton, often within a single track. When a wealth of tracks from artists like him started being made available during those first few Bandcamp Fridays in the early days of the pandemic, I got that feeling I did when I stumbled onto Soundcloud as a kid.

But rather than being disconnected, Bandcamp as a platform offered real connectivity – a chance to give back to these creators, and to find the connections between the artists thanks to the work of the site’s excellent editorial theme, who have championed acts from the scene. Labels like Haus of Altr have given back to their communities as a result, donating their increased revenue to charities like For The Gworls, Afrotectopia, & Afrorack.

As well as supporting him on Bandcamp, I’ve saved a lot of Vargas’ material on Spotify to share with friends and to take on the go. I keep coming back to the 33 EP, especially, which might be the most fluid and impactful statement he’s made so far, combining his workmanlike approach to club music with melancholic, wandering melodies.

I worry that the living nature of that music is going to get lost in the inattentive listening environment that Spotify encourages. The lack of streams in no way lines up with the beating heart of the music; what’s more, acts that Vargas has worked closely with have been upfront about the tiny revenue they see from streams, and the impossibility of uploading material that’s so filled with samples.

Ted Hastings ends his Clash column by asking if we can normalise doing both: supporting with our wallets and enjoying the convenience of streaming. All I know is that not all streams are worth the same. When a play could open a portal to a world you might not have even known was there, it’s easy to wish that all streaming platforms encouraged us to recognise the living cultures behind the endless playlists.

words by skye butchard. illustration by kate prior

New Releases Out Now

HATTIE COOKE ‘Bliss Land’

RYLEY WALKER ‘Course In Fable’

MARINERO ‘Hella Love’

CASSANDRA JENKINS ‘An Overview On Phenomenal Nature’

OST ‘The Parallax View’

GRAVE FLOWERS BONGO BAND ‘Strength of Spring’

MASAYOSHI FUJITA ‘Bird Ambience’

WARISH ‘Next To Pay’

NILS FRAHM ‘Graz’

Castles In Space LP / CD

Husky Pants LP / CD

Cinema Paradiso LP / LP Ltd

Hardly Art LP/CD

Castle Face LP / CD

Ba Da Bing! LP / CD

Erased Tapes LP/LP Ltd /CD

Riding Easy LP/CD

Erased Tapes LP/ CD

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The Beginning: Sweet 16

When Du Blonde was an introverted hippy into happy hardcore and learning ‘Pinball Wizard’

When I was 16 it was 2006 and I was in Newcastle really wishing that I wasn’t. I was thinking, “I am going to go to LA and I am going to go on a road trip”, but that was me in my local park getting stoned and hanging out with these 30-year-olds who were in a psych band. Now I look back, I think that’s pretty fucked up.

I left school when I was 14 because I hated it. I have ADD and dyslexia and my brain doesn’t retain information the way others can. I also have synaesthesia and if I see any letters, numbers or words I just see colours, but I have it so intensely that it makes it difficult to read. This is really overwhelming, so I came up with an alphabet which was a different symbol for each letter, and I would use that in school to take notes – none of the teachers believed I could read this alphabet though.

It wasn’t until my early 20s that I knew what anxiety was. I knew I was different when I was 16 but I didn’t know where that was coming from. Medical diagnosis is so helpful for me; even with the Tourette’s now, which I have recently picked up, being diagnosed means you can help yourself. I can Google anxiety or Tourette’s and there is all of this literature available. I was always an overthinker when I was a kid; I probably still am!

I got a job at a hairdresser’s and a tattoo shop and soon after that I got my first guitar. It was a Fender Stratocaster and it was Daphne blue, which is kind of an egg-shell blue. I thought it looked like a Cadillac and I remember thinking this is my future. I couldn’t play, but my mum’s friend George taught me ‘Pinball Wizard’, and that was the beginning for me.

I got a job at the hairdresser’s because I had a crush on my boss’ son and I thought, “Maybe if I work here he will fall in love with me” – but he didn’t. This is super fucked up but they had a

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tanning booth and my boss told me to try it. They used to call me Bambi as I was so pale and she gave me this cream for protection but it was really a tanning cream – it was a practical joke that was completely impractical and I got so burned that that night I woke up in the middle of the night with skin stuck to the mattress.

The tattoo shop was where I used to hang out all the time.

My friend Dan owned it and he said: “Come and do reception”. I was so bad at it because I was cripplingly shy, so when he wasn’t around I would get crazy anxiety and not answer the phone. Dan cottoned on and one day I came in and there was someone else on reception. I don’t think he wanted to tell me because we were friends, so that was when I started playing music.

The first gig I played was at The Head of Steam in Newcastle. I have really vivid memories of my mum arguing with bouncers as I was underage. I was so nervous, God knows what I was like as a performer. I would play everything so quick; I played 12 songs in 12 minutes because I just had to finish.

My style was interesting. I was a hippy but also into the happy hardcore rave scene, so it was a mix of the two things. My mum bumped into one of my old school friend’s parents the other day and she said, “I remember Beth, she looked like an art installation”. I always wore the weirdest clothes and when I look back now, I was super-shy and insular but visually I wanted attention.

My 16-year-old self would be thrilled that I have made it almost another 16 years, still doing what I love. I am certainly not rich, and I have had plenty of days when I have only had a can of soup to eat, but I wouldn’t change it. I am so lucky that I was in a home where I was supported, and I would be thrilled that I didn’t end up having to get an office job.

as told to ian roebuck

Tim Reaper Real strong bass: dedication and resilience with East London’s most in-demand junglist, by Luke Cartledge On an overcast evening in the middle of an unusually chilly spring, an East London web developer called Ed is reading to me directly from a spreadsheet. A softly-spoken twentysomething, he’s reserved but friendly, patiently talking me through the various commitments he’s got on this year, and how he’s negotiating a reduced-hours contract with his employer. One might not expect such an unassuming figure to moonlight as the visionary producer behind some of the UK’s most exciting new dance music; but then, listening to his work as Tim Reaper, it’s not exactly clear who one would expect to be making this stuff.

To jungle heads, Reaper’s music is at once familiar, stacked with classic breaks and chopped vocals that surge and clatter with the refined ferocity of innovators like Goldie and Dillinja, and refreshingly modernistic, crammed with sideways lurches and sonic juxtapositions to distinguish him from the countless ’90s revivalists who have populated the crustier fringes of the drum and bass scene for years. It’s fast, uncompromising, heavy jungle, with more than enough invention to breathe new life into the now-venerable genre.

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Anyway, back to the spreadsheet, and the day job. “It’s been okay for the past few years,” says Reaper, “but so far this year I’ve got a lot more bookings than usual. So I’m trying to negotiate maybe doing four days a week rather than five, because I could do with the extra day for travel and sorting out guest mixes and releases.”

This will probably be a wise move. Over the last few months, Reaper’s reputation has begun to grow pretty quickly.

A show on NTS radio, a smattering of press and some highprofile releases on well-respected labels like Lobster Theremin and frequent Radio 1 guest Sherelle’s new imprint Hooversound have exposed his work to listeners beyond the core jungle scene, something even this strikingly laidback guy seems (cautiously) excited about.

“It does feel like jungle’s having an ‘in’ period. People who are usually more into techno and dubstep are taking an interest now. I can’t tell you why. But it does feel like a thing that goes in and out of fashion… I was doing this for the longest time, releasing these 12s and stuff, and suddenly there’s all these eyes on us.

“There’s some days I feel like day one after lockdown is going to be complete carnage – everyone’s gonna be fully going for everything”

I think it’s good; whether it lasts or not, I think you should make the most out of it.”

As he says, Reaper has been doing this long enough to be able to take a longer-term perspective on jungle’s fortunes. He’s been immersed in the genre since he was at school, long before its current period of critical and commercial resurgence – not, of course, that jungle’s ever really gone away.

“I was doing my GCSE Media Studies, and I had to compare two music magazines,” he recalls. “One of them was Mixmag, and they had an Andy C mix CD on the cover. And out of curiosity I listened to it and I was completely blown away by the tunes and the DJing. To find out more about it, I started Googling the tracklist and found a few forums, finding more and more examples of producers and labels all involved in this music. At that time MySpace was popular, so I used to rip music off MySpace and listen to it on my iPod. There was a fake DJ Hype profile on there and they had, like, ‘Super Sharp Shooter’ [by DJ Zinc/The Ganja Kru] and stuff on there. And I found myself listening to those tunes in particular, more so than any drum and bass up to that point.”

— Keep digging — For a while, Tim Reaper’s desire to get into jungle was a fairly lonely pursuit. His schoolfriends more interested in popular grime and R&B (“I guess really strong bass was a little bit too much for them”), he spent hours scouring YouTube and jungle forums, gradually finding a community of like-minded bass fans as he went. When I mention that this seems pretty unusual – most dance obsessives I know came to the music through nightlife and friendship, rather than the other way around – he agrees, and points out how this affected his creative development.

“When you have no one to show you the way, you have to guide your own path and discover stuff yourself. So maybe that made me sort of discover as much as I did. Because I was so intrigued by the music, and since I was the only person who could source stuff for myself, it made me used to being patient, like ‘let’s keep digging’.”

This made the young Reaper a real student of the genre, and it shows. From his knack for the perfect sample to the sheer

breadth of knowledge he brings to our conversation, he knows this stuff inside out. And he’s still learning.

“I’m usually listening to music as I’m doing my work during the day, and I’ll take note of things to sample later. Then you source the release it’s on, and if the release is really good, and you can try and investigate the other stuff the artists have done, or if you find them on a compilation, you can find a lot of different artists doing the same kind of style. It gives you loads of branching points to source more stuff. So you’ll go through that…” He undertakes these deep dives and close studies on a daily basis; his level of dedication seems more elite athlete than bedroom producer.

The events of the past year have afforded him more time to refine his craft even further. Still working from no-frills production software FL Studio (fka FruityLoops), he’s become even more prolific, releasing mix after mix and EP after EP, his work getting sharper all the time. Alongside that, he’s set up his own label, Future Retro, initially based on a club night that, like so many others, had to be cancelled last year, showcasing a range of forward-looking bass music from the scene of which he’s become such an integral part.

“A lot of my close friends are label owners, so I would observe how they run things and pick up some best practices.

Before this I’d never had much label experience, but I had the idea for a collaboration series, and I’d built up a bit of a following promoting the first Future Retro night, so I thought I could keep that brand going.”

As productive as he’s managed to be during the pandemic, he’s still keen to get back out there once lockdown eases – and finds space for optimism amid all the gloom of recent months.

“Having the live crowd to react to the music you playing, and being able to bounce off that is an experience that’s quite unmatched. I’ve done DJ streams and parties and stuff, and they’re fine for now, but they don’t really care compared to live events. There’s quite a few bookings I’ve lined up for this year that are not my usual kind of style,” he says. “I really ever get booked for festivals, especially festivals that aren’t drum and bass festivals, so I’m both interested and worried to see what it’ll be like to play to crowds who aren’t there just for jungle. So I’ll have to wait and see if I just get blank stares.

“There’s some days I feel like day one after lockdown is going to be complete carnage – everyone’s gonna be fully going for everything. At the same time, I feel like on day one, maybe not everyone will go out yet, thinking they might see how things go. I’ve seen a few clubs close down, but I’ve also got a booking or two for brand new clubs that have opened, where people have come out of this and want to open new venues. It sometimes feels like it’s never gonna bounce back, but I think sometimes people underestimate other people’s resilience.”

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Wu-Lu The post-genre creativity and community spirit of Miles Romans-Hopcraft, by Cal Cashin. Photography by Tom Porter All is dulled until a flash of verdant lightning illuminates the imperious grey of the South London afternoon. “Have you seen these before?” asks Miles Romans-Hopcraft, as we dawdle up Brixton Hill. I have. The “these” in question are the roseringed parakeets, the green tropical birds that have made London their home over the last few decades, converging on St Matthew’s Square.

“Reckon they’ve been here around half of my life now,” says Miles, Brixton born-and-raised. “Apparently a pair escaped from a zoo somewhere, and just spread.” Electrically charismatic, he’s mapping out a proposal for a Dragonball Z tattoo on his achilles as we walk and talk.

In London, change is inevitable, and this is certainly evident as a pandemonium of parrots encircles our heads. No one really knows how they got here, but The Parakeeting of London by gonzo ornithologist Nick Hunt bristles with theories, each enlightening folk tale more tantalising than truth – they escaped from the set of ‘The African Queen’, Jimi Hendrix released a breeding pair of too-loud pets, etc.

It’s certainly amazing to see tropical birds making London their home, and as long as they’re not destroying the ecosystem – which, contrary to popular hearsay, they are not – then they’re a joyous addition. An enriching invasive species. But change isn’t always this welcome, and Brixton, and areas alike, have seen rents skyrocket. Generations of residents – and usually residents from minority ethnic backgrounds, at that – swept aside by “cool capitalism”. Generations of culture torn apart by property developers, and local family businesses replaced by eateries with names like “Bukowski Bar and Grill”. Gentrification? Plutocratisation? Fucking shit, that’s what it is.

Miles Romans-Hopcraft has lived in Brixton his whole life and has witnessed the area change. His first track of the year under his moniker Wu-Lu, ‘South’, confronts this and articulates the malignant disgust far more eloquently than I ever could: “Priced out forced change / More rent to pay.”

In an earlier interview he said: “It’s a feeling that your area is losing all the things that make it what it is: the smell, the look, the taste, and most importantly, the people.” The track has everything; urgent fingerpicking guitars, a monstrous feature from North London rapper Lex Armor, and a grindcorescream meltdown.

“Yeah, I was angry on that track,” he tells me as we scramble up a ladder onto a roof terrace, a couple of blocks away from The Windmill. All of Brixton, all of creation, suddenly feels very far down – we are higher than the parakeets dare to venture.

“Driving. REVVING. It comes from an angry, angry place.” Miles cracks open a can of delicious Czech lager and points in the direction of the flat he grew up in. He doesn’t seem fazed by how high up we are, relishing the view of familiar settings at a whole new angle.

— Head chef — Wu-Lu is Miles Romans-Hopcraft, producer, multi-instrumentalist, tamperer, but he doesn’t make all the music on his own.

He’s the head chef, with a cast of chefs de partie in the wings.

“Sometimes,” he says of his compositional style, “it will be me, in my bedroom, with the MPC, getting all close. That might transpire into something I’ll show to the band – they might play on top of it, or incorporate it into our set.

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“Or,” he continues, “I’ll get together with the guys, hang out, chilling and jamming in my studio, then I’ll go away and chop it up.

“Or, maybe, it could start as a voice note on the phone, a little sound, random stuff that will make its way onto my computer, and then become something.

“It’s a big mixing pot,” he grins, “and you wanna see what comes out the oven.”

It’s not just the Wu-Lu compositional process that feels like a big musical buffet. His musical influences were diverse before he could walk, and his output is a reflection of this. Miles comes from a very musical family; his dad, Robin, is a touring musician and producer, and twin brother Ben Romans-Hopcraft plays in Childhood, Warmduscher and Insecure Men. “My mum’s a contemporary dancer, that’s her vibe,” he continues. “And my dad plays the trumpet, he’s in his own band called The Soothsayers with a guy called Idris Rahman. Me and my brother always grew up around music and creativity. It was always a positive driving force.

“Growing up we had a lot of Angie Stone, a lot of reggae and dub, hip hop and salsa, rare groove and afrobeat, and as me and Ben got older, we got into our own stuff. Ben went more indie, I went more heavy metal. Skateboarding and graffiti were the backdrop for my teenage years – I still skate when I can, but the injuries last a lot longer these days.”

Currently, Miles is sporting a hoodie from ‘Fela’, the West End musical. Obviously, I compliment it. “My dad and Idris did the music for the London run of the ‘Fela’ shows. That’s where I got this, I just nicked it off him.”

He often talks about DJ Shadow’s Entroducing as a seminal discovery, but his eyes are lit up when a litany of favourite artists are mentioned. Outliers like Mica Levi and Slauson Malone, Sorry and Pink Siifu are on heavy rotation, while he can count figures from the worlds of London’s jazz, rap and guitar music scenes as accomplices and collaborators.

Miles’ music takes all of this on board and spins out something entirely new – the grimy bleeding knees aesthetic of skate-punk meets lo-fi hip-hop, while he forays frequently into plunderphonics and textural jazz. Maybe a reflection of changing tastes, so many emerging artists today defy and eschew traditional notions of genre in favour of something far more patchwork. No one listens to just one genre anymore, and before me is a guy whose first record was either a jungle white label or Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, he just can’t remember which.

— Scream in someone’s face — ‘South’ was the first of a triptych of genre-hopping 2021 songs for Camden label Ra-Ra Rock that have shown Wu-Lu to be an artist finding his voice. It was followed by ‘Times’ in April and ‘Being Me’ in May, a welcome progression from 2019’s stellar S.U.F.O.S. EP. They were all recorded at The Room in Hither Green, a studio and rehearsal space that Miles runs alongside friend and mentor Kwake Bass; a real hub for music in the local area.

The latter two tracks are more reflective than ‘South’, showcasing a much more meditative side of Wu-Lu. ‘Times’

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features primitive Sonic Youth guitar squalls, a rumbling bassline and a rattling drum performance from Morgan Simpson, Black Midi’s virtuoso sticksman, whilst ‘Being Me’ has phases of dream-pop euphoria swirling behind dense textural miasma. “‘South’ is like ROAR,” he says, doing his best velociraptor impression, “and then these recent two tracks are more like roar-aw-oh. “‘Times is a bit more solitude-y,” he continues, “and then ‘Being Me’ is a proper in-your-own-head tune.”

To Wu-Lu, community is everything. His life and his output has been shaped by it, and he spends his time trying to give something back. “These tracks are all based around the perspective of a younger me,” he says. “Or a younger person in general, marrying a lot of stories together that relate to each other. Via youth work, and just growing up around here, there’s recurring headspaces and situations that I feel like need a bit of addressing. “‘Times’ touches on mental health and masculinity. Not talking about it when you’re down and out. Covering things up with, ‘I’m cool, I’m fine, I got this’ energy. It’s kinda like talking about confidence, and that place of knowing that you’re not made of glass. When you’ve got it all out, said what you need to say, and you’ve got the shit out of your head that’s weighing down a lot on you, it’s fine. The world isn’t going to break.”

He regularly runs music workshops for local youth from tough upbringings – “That’s how I met Morgan (Simpson) actually. It was at a youth club a little outside of London, with Moses Boyd. A friend of ours, Nicole, wanted to put on a little masterclass. Me and Moses were having a little jam, and Morgan came on as second drummer. He was holding down really well so I asked him to come and play a few shows with us.”

Miles also boasts recent collaborations with Lianne La Havas and Lex Armor, but perhaps the standout of this kind in his back catalogue is a Nubya Garcia feature on ‘S.U.F.O.S. Pt. 1’ – the title track from his 2019 EP. The London tenor sax virtuoso embosses Wu-Lu’s winding musings with a silken sax line, astral in majesty. “She came in, did one take, and BANG. ‘Leave it like that,’ I said,” Miles recounts, almost awestruck recalling it. “I said, ‘in the next few years, you are going to fly’, and she did.”

Perhaps now, like many of his friends and associates, like the green birds perched on the Ritzy Cinema, it is time for Wu-Lu to just fly too. Underground success is something he’s achieved in abundance, but this wake of singles feels like the time for his star to rise.

“The first thing I want to do after lockdown ends is scream in someone’s face.” His eyes gleam. “Then I want to see the world and make artworks. And I want to bring all my people with me, and create opportunities for the ones after me, basically.”

G.S. Schray Meditative melodies: ambient free jazz from Ohio’s underground,

by Zara Hedderman. Photography by Jenn Kidd

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When Talk Talk entered Wessex Studios in 1987 to record Spirit of Eden, the brooding younger sibling to their exemplary synthpop records, the group were – literally and figuratively – in the dark. Today, those sessions are talked about with a perplexed enthusiasm for the lengths the band went to in order to achieve a specific mood for their reactionary release. A darkened room offset by oil-lamps and strobe lighting provided an unconventional setting for a revolving cast of musicians to improvise for extended periods. As you can imagine, such surroundings had disorientating effects for those involved. This seismic shift in Talk Talk’s repertoire signified the end of the party for their mainstream hits. 33 years on, the resulting Spirit of Eden, an enduring influence on contemporary artists, seamlessly encapsulates the immersive and impenetrable environment in which it was conceived. Its midnight-hued tonal palette provides a perfect backdrop for ‘The Rainbow’s organ flourishes and the choral segment on ‘I Believe in You’ to illuminate and elevate the record.

Listening to The Changing Account, the third LP from Akron-based musician G.S. Schray released via NTS Radio’s label Last Resort, Talk Talk’s post-rock influence permeates Schray’s experimental soundscapes. This is most evident on tracks like the glorious ‘Two Pals Glowing’; moreover, that band’s process of splicing sections from the hours’ worth of session material mirrors Schray’s own method of configuring his meandering arrangements.

“For this record, I laid down some drum tracks at a friend’s studio,” he explains over a Zoom call from his Ohio home. “Other than that, everything was done in this room, actually. A couple of friends called over and improvised over tracks, then I chopped those samples up and arranged them.

No one’s really performing as such, including myself. It was all sort of pieced together like a model aeroplane!” While Schray didn’t necessarily work in a dimly-lit studio or remove himself from the concept of time to reach a particular sound for his latest offering, there’s an undeniable grey-scale cast upon these eight enveloping compositions.

Fusing meditative melodies and loose instrumentation comprising electronic and organic sources, The Changing Account benefits greatly from its slumberous spaciousness. The subtlety of the textures reveals more of its intricacies with each listen. Recorded between 2019 and 2020, the album found its way to audiences in March of this year and the reception has been overwhelmingly positive. “It’s always so funny to read reviews that have come in for these past three albums I’ve put out with Last Resort because, invariably, people refer to the music as Balearic and New Age. To a lot of critics it seems to

evoke a Mediterranean sunset. I absolutely love that, but at the same time, I find it completely wild because all I hear is grey, mid-west, open spaces. It’s really interesting to me that other people’s touchstones for my music tend to be wildly different to mine.” Schray chuckles.

Those touchstones often herald the likes of Angelo Badalamenti, via glacial synths across ‘Still, Puzzled’, and the Durutti Column in the zingy guitar riff that takes centre stage on ‘In Select Everything’. In honing his strand of ambient free jazz, Schray mentions two formative influences on his teenage years in Ohio; local underground scenes and the band Tortoise. “I was probably 17 or 18 years old when my friends and I discovered that there was an underground music scene a few miles east of us in Kent, Ohio,” he explains. “There was a really cool scene there of people a little older than us playing music. My friends and I had been in bands before that, mostly indie rock or punk rock. I feel like that community, and then discovering Tortoise around the same time, set the trajectory for my interests. Everything kind of branches off those two things.”

Years later, Schray continues to nurture a tight-knit underground community in his home state, also performing in Lemon Quartet, while Last Resort labelmate Keith Freund has contributed artwork for Schray’s three records. The inherently DIY aspect to his music, which extends to making his music videos, heightens the overall experience of sitting down with his work. Within this extended Akron scene, Schray is an enigmatic figure; beyond his music, information about him or his musical background is scarce. On Twitter, he frequently retweets images from an account dedicated to sharing screenshots from Gumby: The Movie, a 1995 surrealist claymation film; on Instagram, he posts pictures of his pets alongside striking monochromatic illustrations of them and various individuals. All of these seemingly inconsequential online habits are, in fact, important aspects of his work. If you look closely, you’ll spot a legless clay model in the artwork of his latest LP. — Antenna up — At the midpoint of our conversation, Gabe pauses his train of thought to let his 22-year-old (!) cat, Jarvis (named after the Pulp frontman) into the room and onto his lap, where he’ll remain for the rest of our conversation. Furry friend taken care of, we return to the importance of film and art in his overall artistic expression. In February of this year, Schray animated a striking video for the album’s closing track, ‘Eye on the Menace’.

“I’ve been messing around with animation for the past few years; I’m a dabbler. I don’t take it too seriously, though,” he chuckles.

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Given the sophistication of the visual and aural components of his recent output, coupled with a Frankenstein approach to producing his work, one would assume his home studio is filled with an array of interesting gadgets. On the contrary; his setup is rather understated.

“I’m not really into toys all that much. I guess I have a couple here. I don’t know if you can see, but this would be my favourite toy,” he says, leaning back in his chair and gesticulating towards a double bass. “My friend Ben down in Columbus, Ohio gave it to me because his kids were inserting Lego into it.

I’m not sure if I’m treating it much better, to be honest. I do a lot on my computer now because I find it’s the easiest path to follow through on an idea.”

Ideas have come steadily to Schray since releasing his 2017 debut, Gabriel. Not much time has elapsed between releases, however he’s noticing his creative bursts slowing down.

“I’ve been feeling no inspiration at the moment. I don’t worry about writer’s block, I try not to look at it like that. I’m happy to wait for something to come to me. It seems that periods of creativity happen further apart as I age. At the moment, I’m keeping my antenna up!” This way of considering his creativity, the image of the antenna, is one cultivated by director and musician David Lynch; another source of inspiration for Schray. “He’s huge, definitely. My older brother introduced me to Lynch’s movies when I was growing up. I remember watching Twin Peaks when I was too young to be looking at it. It’s such a great show; the vibe of that really stuck with me. I know Lynch is an obvious touchstone for inspiration, but I love him. Especially his artistic philosophy of being an antenna, helping ideas out to the world and you’re just a conduit. It’s cool!”

— Calm yourself — In these recent quieter times, Schray has turned his attention to music documentaries and going down YouTube spirals. Recently,

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he’s been enjoying old footage of Sunday Night, later known as Night Music, a televised series hosted by Jools Holland and David Sanborn in the late ’80s. “I got really obsessed with watching that because it features music I wouldn’t have naturally encountered. I get the impression it was originally targeted to people who were in their 30s in the late ’80s. The majority of the guests come from jazz influenced pop disciplines. But then they’ll have The Residents or Sonic Youth or a younger band. It’s a really weird show! I’ve had a lot of fun delving into it because it’s like a survey of this really specific genre and really specific era. I don’t know if it’s that I’m finally the age that it was aimed for. It’s a really fun way to discover new things.”

Listening to G.S. Schray’s music, its mellow nature suggests he’s a laidback guy. He’s extremely easy and fun to talk to about a variety of topics, from Night Music to his disdain for recent rock memoirs penned by Dean Wareham and Chris Frantz, respectively. He’s also extremely forthcoming and thoughtful when discussing his music and the direction he wants to take it in the future. Here, his mindset and willingness to eschew mainstream expectations and trends echoes Talk Talk’s Mark Hollis circa 1987. “Yesterday I started working on a tune for a compilation somebody asked me to be part of. I mentioned earlier that I haven’t been inspired to make music since [The Changing Account] came out. This project’s got the gears turning and I was enjoying it,” he says with a smile. “I’m getting a little tired of, how do I put it, a zeitgeisty thing in indie music now where there’s a lot of music being made to chill you out.

I think it has a lot to do with Covid-19, this idea that people need something to calm themselves. It seems like there’s a glut of music being described that way. I can see it congealing into a pretty stale thing. And like I said earlier, I don’t see my music that way but if other people do then I guess that’s true to a certain extent. So now, I want to make something that’s ugly and a little more anxious. I think I might go in that direction. I don’t know, I guess it’s sort of a reactionary thing on my behalf.”

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John FM A Detroit artist makes sense of contemporary America through fractured soul music, by Oskar Jeff. Photograghy by Wolfgang Tillmans

Detroit native John FM has been working on his creative approach for a long time now. Having come up through his local club scene, he’s now moving away from his straight-up house roots towards a form of fractured soul, yearning for sense and humility in an increasingly bizarro world. On recent EP American Spirit, he fuses open-ended vocal experimentation with a considered dismantling of his hometown’s club palette; the resulting sound brings to mind the work of artists as varied as Yves Tumor, Dean Blunt and Frank Ocean.

There’s an ambiguous quality to the record that matches the bewildering socio-political landscape, yet an emotional directness that offers perhaps not answers, but something beyond apathetic anger. The addled narrative of standout track ‘Holster’ paints the image of a shooting at a house party from multiple perspectives, simultaneously vivid and faint in its execution. Elsewhere, interlude ‘Interim’ compounds the unresolved angst of the record through little more than an insidiously hypnotic jangle atop combatively dulled kick drums, reminiscent of Actress at his most joyfully anarchic. As a whole, it’s a concise, shifting portrait of our uncertain times, sure of only its own disbelief, a mirror facing outward.

The marked shift from the club-focused tracks of his earlier releases is undoubtedly borne from the yearlong lull that is the ongoing Covid pandemic. The project’s inception was marred by false starts, with many of the tracks originating from sketches created across the five-year period since his last record. Speaking to John from his home, there’s a sense that the forced stasis of life was crucial to the process of constructing the finished collection.

“At the beginning of the pandemic, I didn’t know if I was going to continue making music anymore,” he says. “How will anyone make a living off music? With no live shows, that’s really it. So I took my time, lived life. Riding my motorcycle kind of gave me the time away – working on it, doing some maintenance, and just thinking of things other than music. Then I kind of just said, ‘Fuck it. Just put something out.’”

The EP was originally self-released on Bandcamp last year, one of many producers to use the platform to explore less dancefloor-centric excursions during the height of the pandemic.

“I think it was really important that the Bandcamp Fridays happened. It just seemed like it happened at the right time. There was a lot of space for introspection and being alone. Headphone music was perfect for that. I don’t think people would have been paying attention the same way if they didn’t have the time to.”

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Does this explain the doubling-down on the vocal element that have been somewhat on the periphery of his previous work?

“Even back to my first release with [Detroit house figurehead] Omar S, it had two house tracks and one with me singing. It was always kind of on the cards for me to develop that aspect. When we first met, what interested Omar most was the fact that I could sing, not the fact that I could produce.”

I ask how the cultural landscape of Detroit shaped his musical development. “I always found house music as an easy outlet to put my foot in the door, and then I felt like maybe the right opportunity would present itself to say, ‘Hey, I also do this.’

In Detroit you have to appeal to one of two main outlets. Garage rock is a thing, but really it’s house music or street rap, and the street rap is as involved with the street as it is in the studio. It’s volatile as fuck. So these are your two real options, unless you wanna move to New York or LA, but it was imperative for me to stay here. You don’t survive here, you live here, and you can thrive here. The money goes further than it does elsewhere.”

American Spirit acts as a blurred snapshot of the past few years in America. I ask John if this is an attempt to reclaim the narrative of his country in the eyes of the wider world, or a complete rejection of where it has ended up.

“Since 2016, America has been theatre in its primal form.

It’s perturbing – you can’t write this shit, it’s literally happening.

We are the fools. The project kind of addresses a lot of that stuff.

There’s just so much to grab out here. It’s hard to put concisely, unfortunately.” The record embodies that feeling well – the struggle of making sense of it all and the resulting futility. “Yeah, but it’s a critique,” he says. “Like ‘Holster’, I was at that party, but left before the shooting because I was too drunk. Yet this story happened, and I’m trying to think about it from all angles. A friend of mine was superficially wounded, it’s upsetting. But this is classic fodder for American popular music. It’s recontextualising it, highlighting how strange it is for it to become fetishised from the outside for entertainment. It’s this selling of pain. [By extension] tracks like ‘February’ and ‘Interim’ are like cries, you know?

It’s the protest. It’s protest music.”

— Raw flavours — The project now sees re-release on XL Recordings, perhaps the beginning of a trend that will see self-released music from the last year finding wider audiences. “We’ve gone through talks with several labels before this,” says John. “Just deals that never settled, never seemed right. When XL approached us, we just felt it was a really good opportunity.”

There is a refreshing honesty to John’s manner as he talks about his work; a clear consideration of how his more politicallyminded music is perceived and how it fits into the wider landscape.

“When you’re trying to make a statement with music,” he says, “it’s hard to be so true and blue sometimes. It’s felt like a conundrum lately to try to put out something that’s so overtly political, while also making money off of it. The thing that you’re fighting is the thing that you’re co-opting to get your point across.

I’m trying to work at a way around that. Like the worst thing is something like Kendall Jenner giving a police officer a Pepsi [in

the infamous 2017 ad]. Corporations co-opting these movements that actually have something to say and just belittling it.

[Pretending] we’re all against the government, we’re all against what’s happening. Yeah, but you’re making money off of it; you’re part of the problem.”

I interject that sometimes I worry that they may not just be tastelessly co-opting, but perhaps they are so delusional that they cannot see the contradictions at play, perhaps a more frightening thought altogether.

“Yeah, the theatrics have blended into our reality way too much. I’m trying to be more of the cause and not the effect of the effect. I’m playing the game by picking up a record label, but I need to live, I need to eat. Ultimately, that’s also going to give me room to speak my mind in a way that will make this accessible to a greater number of people.”

I add that, in the grand scheme of things, people are doing much worse things in this world than putting something out on a record label. He laughs.

“Yeah, you’re right, it’s true. I don’t need to beat myself up about it. I just want to make sure that if I do have something important to say, that it’s accessible to everyone, and to never be preachy, just give them my perspective, and something to think about. A lot of observation, time, patience and pain was released with this record.”

I’m intrigued to find out what music engages John, be it the local scene or beyond. “Cody Chesnutt was imperative to me,” he says. “His release The Headphone Masterpiece never landed as well [publicly] as I would have hoped. But right now, the local street rap: Sada Baby, Louie Ray, Rio Da Yung OG. My favourite rapper right now is YN Jay. [Retrospectively] I always go back to ghettotech – that genre is amazing to me. When I was growing up, driving around with my dad, listening to [artists like] DJ Slugo and DJ Assault, passing all the nightclubs. That was my first little taste of nightlife; I was seven years old, thinking what the hell’s going on in that club!” Artists as far-ranging as Prince, Jay Electronica, Death Grips and 03 Greedo also come up throughout our conversation, and I wonder what defining through-line John sees across these influences.

“The raw flavours are what I look for. Unpolished energy - that’s the number one for me. I love Prince, but I like the demos better. I love [Dean Blunt’s album] Black Metal, but I like the mixtapes more. One of my favourite D’Angelo tracks is a leaked cover of [Soundgarden track] ‘Black Hole Sun’. It’s just a low volume demo on YouTube. I love it because it’s like mixtape culture. Like Dean Blunt on the Babyfather project, he’ll just have his boys doing those world premiere-style ad-libs. That’s such a dope idea, bringing that feeling, you know?” I suggest that it is when you can feel that someone gives a fuck about what they’re doing, but they don’t give too much of a fuck. John laughs. “It’s a sweet balance for sure.”

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Cola Boyy Matthew Urango’s Marxist disco, by Jemima Skala.

Photography by Ross Harris

If all you knew of Cola Boyy was his music, you might expect someone at least a bit zanier and more light-hearted than Matthew Urango. Where his music is funky, heavily indebted to the squelchy disco revival that’s trickling into pop music at the moment, when we speak over Zoom one evening in May from his home in Oxnard, California, Urango is serious, considering each of my questions with great care and gravity. He is loquacious, but every word is chosen carefully; he rarely allows himself to crack a smile, and he appears to really resent any occasional interruptions to our conversation, admonishing his dog for barking loudly and rushing off-camera visibly annoyed at one point when someone knocks incessantly at his door.

His forthcoming debut album Prosthetic Boombox plays with this duality very cleverly. Wrapped up in the shimmery nostalgia of funk basslines, Chic-esque guitars and soft keys, Cola Boyy is Urango’s way of slipping subtle political messages into what’s just a very good pop album. “I would consider myself a revolutionary artist, or the people’s artist, more than anything.

I studied Marxism and other revolutionary theory, so I would call myself a Marxist,” he clarifies – his press release describes him as “a devoted communist”.

So what role do his politics play in his music? “Pop music is very infectious,” he says. “It’s palatable and people like it, it reaches people’s ears, gets stuff in people’s heads, and if I’m trying to convey an idea or a message, how better to get it out there than in a way that’s catchy as hell?” He explains, “Of course, most music under capitalism is literally controlled by the bourgeoisie, so a lot of disco in the ’70s was very bourgeois. It was very decadent and escapist, and in the ’80s music was very emotional, all about love and partying. I understand those types of topics are very synonymous with my style of music, but it doesn’t mean it has to be that way. You can write a catchy song that still has meaning and is going to serve the people and their struggle.” He pauses and says, “It’s also a fun challenge for me: how can I make a catchy song that’s relatable on a broad scale, that conveys a message or experience that people can relate to, but that’s also not preachy and shoving politics down everybody’s throats? Nobody wants that, that’s not how you win people over.

You win people over through relating to them and trusting you, them seeing themselves in you.”

— Don’t forget your neighbourhood — Born and raised in Oxnard, California, Urango involved himself early on in the city’s vibrant punk scene, which is where his political sensibilities began to form. After learning to play guitar and piano as a child, he began playing in bands and writing snatches of songs as a teenager. Though the punk politics of the scene “were very emotional and not very precise”, it taught him the possibility of rebellion in any given situation. While his current musical output is a far cry away from his gritty punk roots, Urango says the scene influenced his musical ideology of taking whims and running with them. “I’m not very limited in where I’m willing to go on a musical level,” he says. “I just don’t give a fuck, and if I want to make a song that sounds like this, I’m going to do it.”

From the opening song on Prosthetic Boombox, ‘Don’t Forget Your Neighbourhood’, both Cola Boyy’s politics and carefree attitude to music are abundantly clear. Urango’s strident, slightly nasal voice rises above chirpy piano stabs and dreamy chimes to profess a message of community; a call to immerse yourself and uplift those around you. Even the album title is a coded reference to Urango’s own disability: he has spina bifida and wears a prosthetic leg. Originally, ‘prosthetic boombox’ was the title of a song that Urango wrote five years ago. “When I wrote that song,” he remembers, “I was on the path of resolving a lot of self-esteem issues, anger and bitterness, becoming more accepting of my circumstances.” It also references the fact that Urango always wanted his debut album to sound like an eclectically curated radio show, with lots of songs drawing on different genres, hence ‘boombox’. “It had its meanings, but also if people don’t know what the fuck it means, it sounds cool,” he concedes.

Being more open about his disability and letting go of how people perceive him is a prominent part of the album closer ‘Kid Born In Space’. “I’m talking to my old self, in a way. I’m telling myself, all those years that you were upset or angry, you don’t

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“The root of why disabled people are alienated is that they’re not able to join the workforce, therefore they have no value under capitalism”

gotta have those feelings,” he explains. “None of us are taught why we’re treated the way we are. The root of why disabled people are alienated is that they’re not able to join the workforce, therefore they have no value under capitalism. That’s why you’re taught to alienate disabled people at a young age. Once I realised that, I stopped being mad at people, even though people bullied me, because I realised that they have stuff going on at home too that they’re struggling with. So I think ‘Kid Born In Space’ is kind of an anthem to that.” Originally an upbeat disco tune, inspired by the proclamatory joy of Diana Ross’ ‘I’m Coming Out’ and Urango shedding the weight of outside expectations, he reworked it with Andrew VanWyngarden of MGMT, with whom he became close after supporting the duo on tour. It was VanWyngarden who suggested slowing it all the way down, and lo and behold the song was formed.

As a musician with a visible disability, Urango says that he finds it hard to balance being open about his life with being reduced to just that guy with a prosthesis. “Something that’s a big part of the resolve that I have with myself is being open about my disability, and my understanding of the world and myself isn’t something I’m doing to further set myself apart from others. Through understanding the world around me through an end-to-capitalist standpoint, understanding economically how all these things are connected, I want to relate to people more. I want people to know about these things, not so that I can further distinguish myself, but so that I can lessen the space between us. Maybe people would be like, I have no idea what it’s like to be disabled or have a prosthesis, but that’s not the point. The point is that the system that we live under created these conditions for me, and they created the conditions that others are experi-

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encing, so raising that understanding through my music or platform or even in interviews like this is really what my goal is.”

This idea of bringing people together is also pertinent for the musical creation of Prosthetic Boombox. It features collaborations with the likes of MGMT, Myd, Air, The Avalanches and Connan Mockasin, which are all admittedly big-name features, although Urango is clear to say that his professional endeavours with them came about through genuine friendship and a desire to elevate the music rather than his own profile. Philosophising briefly, he says, “collaboration is important in so many aspects of life, and it’s something we’re taught not to do. We’re shaped to be individualistic and cut others off. There’s a tendency in music today to be like, I did all this, it’s all me. I understand there’s a sense of wanting to have creative control, but nothing compares to working with others. There are things that I can’t do that I want to heighten my songs. I want my songs to be the best possible and I put that over my own ego. What matters is the final product and whether people like it, cos at the end of the day, they’re not really going to give a damn if I did this, that and the third. They just want the song.”

— Revolutionary optimism — Urango has been harnessing the power of his songs recently to find new ways to involve himself in politics. Though he has previously been very active in grassroots political movements as a member of the Todo Poder Al Pueblo collective (a small farleft group that fights for immigrant rights in Oxnard), he has decided to take a more consciousness-raising approach as his music takes up more and more of his time; he recently played a concert in Oxnard raising awareness of the plight of the people in Rondônia, Brazil, who have seized land from their landlord and now 150 families are facing government-sanctioned massacre. Through playing gigs like that, he’s found he can draw in a bigger audience to his political endeavours.

Marxism wrapped in a disco disguise, Cola Boyy exudes a revolutionary optimism that is at once intimidating and galvanising. He says that he’s heartened by the protests that swept the world last year against police brutality as a sign that “the whole world is dying, and the new world is struggling to be born.” He is also clear that whatever role he plays in this, ultimately his part is not important: “I’m just one person, I’m not going to make history. It’s the masses that make history.”

Regardless of whether or not that actually transpires, Cola Boyy is perhaps the reminder everyone needs to gird your loins, do your bit and get stuck in.

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The sound of your own mini apocalypse, by Alexander Smail.

Photography by Jake Kenny

For Breakfast Songs in the Key of O opens with a lumbering beast of a track called ‘Machine’. Cascading new-age synths and a twangy bassline are pierced by the trill of a flute as For Breakfast’s lead vocalist Maya Harrison sings about a mechanised monster on its last legs. Its gears grind to a halt and oil sputters out of its mouth as the song eventually crashes into a wall of EDM distortion that bassist (and de-facto manager) Sam Birkett gleefully admits sounds horrific. “That song is a bit of a Frankenstein,” he explains over Zoom alongside the other members of the band.

“It’s been through a lot of iterations over its lifetime.”

An amorphous creature from the beginning, iteration is fused into the DNA of For Breakfast. With numerous members leaving and joining over its history – including during the making of the EP – the North London sextet have had to constantly readjust and redefine who they are. Founding member Maya is used to this level of mess.

“It’s been a long and winding journey,” she says with a laugh when asked about the band’s origins. Sam and former guitarist Joe Thompson met Maya at university, where she would watch them jam to reggae drum loops they found on YouTube.

“Neither of us could really play our instruments. It was noise rock, but accidentally noise rock,” Sam explains.

“It was horrible,” corrects Maya.

After she joined, the group went through a sequence of mutations that culminated in them uploading a couple of tracks to Soundcloud in 2017. The band’s flugelhorn player left and drummer Will Eckersley joined, followed by guitarist Omar Zaghouani and flautist Gail Tasker, and For Breakfast in its current form began to materialise.

Songs in the Key of O is the summation of their journey so far. Messy and bold, the EP is an unwieldy mishmash of genres and styles that revels in the absolute chaos of it all. Postpunk, dream pop, jazz, noise rock and gruff psychedelia are all crammed into its 20-minute runtime, and each of its four tracks wind up in wildly different places from where they began.

Dissonant musical influences are common when such a large group of people come together, but For Breakfast really do run the gamut: Sam is at home in post-punk, taking inspiration from Canadian quartet Preoccupations; lead vocalist and synth player Maya is a pophead; Omar’s background is in progressive

and noise-rock; Gail loves jazz; Will previously played in instrumental metal bands; and newest member Eden Harrison, saxophonist and “bleeps and bloops” man, has an affinity for techno and ambient.

“We don’t actually recognise most of the artists each other listens to,” Gail admits. “If you asked us all which artists influenced us the most and the music we make, we would all say completely different things,” adds Eden. While most bands would settle on how their music should sound at the outset, or maybe let different members take control on different songs, every single decision For Breakfast make is done by committee.

“Our unwritten rule is that we always try everyone’s suggestions,” says Will. “We never dismiss or scorn a theory. Everyone’s always contributing something to everything.”

With this “painfully democratic” approach to writing, it takes the group a long time to get anything done – but with every member’s voice heard, they’re usually all fully satisfied with the result. Songs in the Key of O sucks in all of their ideas like a vacuum and spits them out in new and exciting ways. ‘Bill Season’ ebbs and flows between periods of loud and relative quiet, where a bluesy flute and placid vocal melodies intermittently give way to machine-gun drum rhythms and screaming guitar, before reaching a rapturous crescendo. “Are you watching the fallout?” Maya sings joyously as the world collapses all around her.

Written long before “social distance” and “self-isolation” became part of our everyday vocabulary, the climactic nature of the EP feels eerily prescient. Miles Davis composition ‘Nardis’ was first made famous with a dreamily melancholic rendition by Bill Evans; For Breakfast’s take on the jazz standard is a Lynchian nightmare. Stuttering guitar plucks and a languid sax hover in the mix as Maya soliloquises with the stony conviction of a cult leader. The squelch of footsteps in mud creeps into the midsection, tempting you to look over your shoulder as they inch closer. Gail stresses that the band didn’t intentionally set out to corrupt Evans’ mellow tune. But Omar cuts in: “If we were going to play it, it was going to get corrupted.”

Similarly, beneath a veneer of saccharine vocal and flute melodies, ‘Mother’ hides a post-apocalyptic lullaby. “Hide in darkness with me / Scratch my teeth and pull them out / Hide

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them from your mother,” Maya gleefully sings over a grotesquely sweet instrumental. She explains that the song is about keeping secrets from your parents: “It’s that cheery face you put on when maybe everything’s not actually fine.” Like ‘Machine’, it ends in a violent cacophony that eviscerates any lingering doubt that the song was in the slightest bit wholesome.

— Ephemeral fun — For Breakfast didn’t need a global pandemic to inspire the dramatic soundscapes for Songs in the Key of O. Anxiety, politics and the climate crisis provided more than enough fodder for their doomsday mood board. “I think we’re all fairly aware that the world is ending and everything is shit,” sighs Maya. “Yeah, it wasn’t like there wasn’t a lot of material to work with before we actually did have a global cataclysm. We are living in a time that, for one reason or another, feels very climactic,” adds Sam. “I think that’s also just the classic feeling of being someone in their mid-20s,” she says. “Every day is like your own mini apocalypse.” The heightened emotions of this extended adolescence is reflected in the wild tonal shifts on Songs in the Key of O. “The EP is definitely very happy and then very not, an obvious

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dichotomy of emotions,” explains Eden. “You get dumb shit and funny shit happening right next to really traumatic stuff, and I think we’ve always enjoyed the contrast between those two modes in our music,” Sam elaborates.

When asked if the pandemic has changed the group’s outlook at all, Omar summarises: “Now, we just feel meh.” This coming-of-age cynicism has seeped into their upcoming second EP, which the band hope to have out by the end of the year. With Gail and Eden part of the process from the beginning this time around, the new release will mark the next transformation for the collective. Writing the songs around this new wind section, they say their new music is freakier and sexier than anything they’ve done before. As Will matter-of-factly puts it: “If Songs in the Key of O was sinister carnival music, the next EP is sinister porn music.”

How long this configuration of the band will last is anyone’s guess, but it doesn’t matter. For Breakfast is now a self-sustaining machine; one that can survive the comings and goings of a bunch of 20-somethings. Depending on who is part of the group at any given time, it adapts, morphs and evolves into something unrecognisable from what came before. “It’s quite ephemeral,” Sam muses. “But I think that’s what makes it fun.”

Greentea Peng Unity in trip-hop,

by Katie Beswick.

Photography by Jonangelo Molinari

“Ultimately, it’s an offering isn’t it?” Greentea Peng tells me.

We’re talking about her new album, which was recorded last year in a house in the depths of Surrey woodland. Here, Aria, as she is known to her friends, retreated with her band to process the trauma we were all living through in the midst of the pandemic.

The result she describes as an attempt at healing. It’s “an offering to the collective”, the spirit of all humanity. Unity. Totality.

Oneness. That’s the vibe she’s bringing for this project, an hourlong, 18-track album called Man Made. “I wanted it to be one hour eight minutes long. 108, 18… good numbers. But it turned out to be one hour one minute long. 11, which is my number. 18 tracks. So, I’m happy with the numbers. I think that there could have been a lot more music on there in terms of how much we made. It could have been a lot longer. We kept it as concise as we could have, going through the year that I did and the emotions and the roller coaster that I did. It’s not a tube ride album; it’s a make your environment, sit down and listen. I wanted it to be a trip. It’s meant to be a trip – you’re meant to enter it. One way in, one way out.

“I’m doing it for the collective, not the culture,” Aria says, paraphrasing one of her lyrics as she pushes her plate towards me.

The idea of the collective comes up a lot as we chat, sitting in the cold May sunshine outside Kilis Kitchen in Islington, eating what is probably the best baklava in London. (“So good right?” She laughs, seeing my face as I bite through the thin, syrupy pastry. “I keep coming back here. I can’t stop coming here and ordering this stuff”). “The collective,” she explains. “It’s not a passing trend.

It’s totality. Because the collective’s first and foremost – totality – it’s us as a tribe. I’m not really trying to [make music] for any one section. It’s collective, do you know what I mean?”

I do know what she means. If lockdown and the fear of human contact (not to mention the disastrous consequences of the raging egoism in power everywhere you look) have shown us anything, it’s that we need one another – and it’s that we need more ways to recognise and connect with one another’s humanity than the options that are currently available. “The reign of the individual, I think, is coming to an end,” Aria says. “It seems to be just not sustainable.”

— Out of tune with Babylon — This turn to the power of collective energy is reflected in the making process as well as the sound of the new record. If Aria’s previous music has been produced as something of an isolated undertaking that sees her laying pre-written lyrics over other people’s instrumentals, Man Made was a much closer collaboration. The band stayed in her friend’s house in the woods for a month, setting up a studio and working together to produce the project from scratch, detuning instruments to change the frequencies in which they recorded, so as to enhance what Aria calls “The healing properties,” of the album. “It’s meant to be out of tune with Babylon basically. It’s not meant to fit into this industry standard.”

“It’s a provocation of spirit.” She expands. “It’s not meant to be anything except get people in their feelings. And that’s what I want. I want it to resonate.” This spirituality is, of

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the signs – you can keep ignoring things, getting into the same patterns and cycles and choosing to ignore it, but you’re still on the same spiritual path, you’re just choosing to reject it. And I stopped choosing to reject it and started choosing to embrace it. I don’t class myself as a highly spiritual person, you know. I drink, I take drugs. I’m fucking negative. I’m no better than the next person, but I’m open to the mystical side of this existence and I guess most people aren’t.”

— It doesn’t need to be a dread song —

course, at the core of all music. But Aria is right that there is something especially, unusually, resonant about the sound of the music on Man Made, which pulls in influences from trip-hop, R&B and jazz vocals. It’s both nostalgic (my favourite sample is the reference on ‘Dingaling’ to Blak Twang’s classic track ‘So Rotton’) and also utterly now. There is a lightness of touch in the way Greentea Peng manages issues that might be controversial in other hands. On ‘Nah It Ain’t The Same’, for example, she plays with ideas of gender and identity, managing to tap into the current culture wars without adding to the toxic divide. “At the end of the day we’re living in controversial times and for me there’s nothing else to fucking talk about is there? I’m not trying to add fuel to any fires. At the beginning, of the album I was in a mind-state where it was gonna be a super political project, but that’s not what we need. That’s not what we need, bruv!” She takes another bite of baklava. “I’m just exploring all the themes.

There’s lots of bandwagons about right now, but I’ve never really been one for a bandwagon.”

If all the talk about the collective and the spiritual sounds fanciful in the context of an album promotion, there is something straightforward about the way Aria discusses the spiritual or mystical dimension of our existence. She reminds you of its practicality. That is, if we want to align with what’s meant for us, there isn’t really a choice but to tap into some kind of spiritual energy, whatever that might mean for us individually. “Obviously, we’re all on our own spiritual journeys whether people wanna realise it or not,” Aria says. “And you can keep missing

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The call to creative expression has been part of Aria’s spiritual journey. Living in Mexico, she realised that the performance and writing she had loved as a child were missing from her life, and that maybe this was connected with how miserable she was feeling. “I guess I didn’t really notice the correlation between the lack of creative expression and the misery for a long time – and then I did, and I started singing again and everything just kind of literally [fell into place]. It’s ridiculous really. From singing, really waved, at an open mic night, to just playing gigs around the town I was living in. It was pretty full on straight away – getting booked out and shit. And then moving back to London, only planning on being here for the summer, and things taking off here and before I know it it’s three years later and I’m here.”

Still, there is a difficult path ahead maybe, trying to align a spiritual, healing journey with the notoriously toxic culture of the commercial music industry – not least because the promotion of a solo album requires the kind of self-absorption that surely goes against any notion of the collective. I wonder how she’s going to balance the necessary compromises of making money from a spiritual pursuit. “I’ve only just entered into [the indusry],” she replies, “so I’m still kind of gaging some sort of equilibrium, or trying to – so fuck knows really how I’m gonna balance it. Let’s see, I might not. It does seem like it’s gonna be quite stressful to be honest. Especially because it’s just not really in my character to do half the shit that I’m having to do these days. But I just kind of accepted it as part of the exchange of getting to do what I love and live the life that I want to live, relatively free. And part of that exchange is the Babylon shit – the self-promoting, talking about yourself all the time, taking photos of yourself all the time.

All of that shit when all I wanna be doing is making music. Hopefully I will find some sort of equilibrium.”

For this album at least there is a real sense of a that balance. Of hope, even while acknowledging that things are a mess. Aria leans back in her chair: “My dad just died, and then I went to make an album, so there’s obviously a lot of grief in it.

There’s a lot of grief in me to be honest, as a person. So obviously that’s gonna translate in the music. But I do try to always round it back up to love and unity – that is my main thing. So even when I’m exploring themes of grief and depression, and of, I dunno, rebellion – obviously I’m pro people, so I’m not trying to put something into the collective that’s gonna bring people’s vibration down. I’m trying to do the opposite. It’s important to me. I think all my songs do touch on sad subjects, but it doesn’t need to be a dread song, you know what I mean? I never want to just add fuel to the fire and not offer up any solutions.”

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Reviews

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Albums

Alexis Marshall — House of Lull. House of When (sargent house) When Daughters returned from an extended hiatus in 2018 they caught many offguard. Since their beginnings as an enthusiastic if distracted math-rock/grindcore act in the early 2000s, they’d been known as a fearsome live band, deservedly lauded for their sheer commitment to noise, but were something of a curio in heavy music circles: interesting, yes, charismatic certainly, but hardly world-beaters. To witness them explode from their slumber with You Won’t Get What You Want, one of the decade’s most brutal, terrifying, and exhilarating records, was quite the shock.

House of Lull. House of When, the debut solo album by Daughters frontman Alexis Marshall, is less of a shock, but that’s no failure. We expect high standards from this guy now, having heard him provide such a compelling focal point at the centre of his band’s industrialstrength doom-punk. And he delivers on those expectations here.

Marshall’s declarative, strained vocal is the record’s guiding light, and benefits from these comparatively roomy arrangements, away from the thunderous squall of his bandmates. His tendency to repeat oblique mantras by way of refrain is even more pronounced than on YWGWYW, the shrieks of “The past is like an anchor!” on opener ‘Drink from the Oceans. Nothing Can Harm You’ somehow transforming from a little hammy to genuinely cathartic over the course of the track. Throughout the album, metallic percussion and tinnituslike feedback cascade around his voice, underwritten by portentous keys and evoking Tilt-era Scott Walker as much as Marshall’s post-hardcore contemporaries.

This cultivated chaos is most effective on

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the album’s final song, ‘Night Coming’, on which a rippling, pressurised synth gradually subsumes his muttered vocal, a wave of unconsciousness finally cresting over an anxiety attack.

Comparisons to Nick Cave and Blixa Bargeld will doubtless greet the release of House of Lull. House of When, and while they’re not irrelevant, they are insufficient. It feels like Alexis Marshall is driving at something new for heavy music: just as Daughters are redefining the boundaries of noise-rock for the 21st century, their frontman is applying a similar logic to his individual distillation of darker-than-dark American gothic songcraft. This stuff is fucking hard work – in a really good way. 8/10 Luke Cartledge

羅伯特 — Lexicon (piece of work) 羅伯特, a phonetic transliteration of the word “Robert”, is the alter ego of San Francisco techno DJ and producer Robert Yang, aka Bézier, who cut his teeth in queer nightlife collective Honey Soundsystem and now splits his time between his hometown and Berlin. If you have a sense from that combination of names, identities and locations about how Lexicon, Yang’s second record as 羅伯特, sounds, then you’re about two thirds right: 30 of the 45 minutes here is battle-hardened no-nonsense acid techno, super four-square and muscular, repetitive and robofunking, with hulking hooks and relentless drive – the kind that’s brilliantly impossible to sit still to and undeniably moreish, even if half an hour is actually about the right amount in any environment outside a dark sweaty club.

The remainder of Lexicon, though, is given over to slightly stranger fare that offers a welcome break from the rave:

‘Inhalation’ and ‘Pseudonym’ are woozy, funereal stomps whose sinister atmosphere would ably soundtrack a ’90s video game boss battle, and ‘Assimilate’ has almost post-rock roots, with its sawtooth distorted riff and heavy dynamics. These investigations don’t always mesh with the surrounding techno, but taken, as its title suggests, as a collection of Yang’s musical vocabulary, Lexicon shows admirable range, depth and heft.

7/10 Sam Walton

Daniel Avery — Together in Static (phantasy sound) For the last couple of years, Bournemouth-born producer Daniel Avery has been hopping from one experimental project to the next, with each evolving from the slick tech-house of his phenomenal debut Drone Logic.

Last spring he unveiled the mesmerising Alessandro Cortini collaboration Illusion of Time, before dropping his exhilarating double album Love + Light. He soon followed these with a composition for the poignant short film Void and even a handful of EPs, remixes and singles.

You might think that after all of that Avery would be ready to put his feet up, but instead he’s topping off this streak with his fourth solo album, entitled Together in Static. Initially the project was simply a 12” single, but quickly snowballed into a fully-fledged LP, eventually taking on the aim to be performed in its entirety to celebrate the much-missed joy of live music.

Across 41 minutes, Together marries kaleidoscopic, synth-laden ambient with pulsing beats in a fashion that is recognisable as the producer’s signature, echoing early Aphex Twin or Boards of Canada on tracks like ‘Hazel

Albums and Gold’. Occasionally Avery leans fully into one of the two extremes, like a diver coming up for air and stillness (‘Nowhere Sound’) before plunging back down to the epic, intense depths of the ocean (‘Endless Hours’).

Together in Static feels like a culmination of Avery’s recent stylistic explorations and interests; there aren’t too many surprises, but it does present the artist operating at his most focussed, highlighting his strongest qualities as a spark of modern EDM. 8/10 Woody Delaney

Darkside — Spiral (matador) Just as Darkside were about to break through, they stopped existing. Nicolás Jaar and Dave Harrington began with no expectations. The project was a freeform jam that allowed both to step out of their comfort zones. The two met when Jaar was looking for a third musician to join him and his long-time collaborator Will Epstein as he toured his debut album, Space is Only Noise. Epstein recommended Harrington, who was already a firm part of the New York jazz/psych/everything scene. After a brief jam session, he had the gig. It’s an unsexy, functional origin story for a band that would become known for being so explorative, but even on that tour you could feel the push-and-pull that has come to define the band.

Harrington approached the live show as a natural improviser, and Jaar himself had performed fully-improvised shows, including a five-hour set at MOMA PS1, which morphed into new forms depending on his collaborators, the audience and his mindset in any given moment. On the tour, the two were finding ways to transform Jaar’s material for a live setting, leaving empty space for

wherever inspiration would take them on any given night, in any given room.

Tension and playfulness coexisted in those moments. But offstage, they had stumbled onto something new.

The two enjoyed playing together in their downtime between shows. Jaar’s fluid approach to electronic music played off Harrington’s melodic and grounded guitar playing in a way that allowed both artists to try things that weren’t possible without the other. Before long, they had put a name to their jamming, released an EP, and booked live performances.

And what live shows they were.

Anyone who caught Darkside on their Psychic tour will be able to attest to the magnetism of those hypnotic sets. I was lucky enough to see them at Glasgow Art School in 2014. A fire alarm went off halfway through the set. We had to stand outside in the rain for about half an hour, and it’s still one of the best gigs I’ve been to. On their own, the two artists are champions of tension and release; this is only amplified when they play off each other, casually extending ideas as they come to them, or delaying the payoff until it bubbles over into euphoria.

The magic of their debut album, Psychic, is that they somehow manage to capture the in-the-moment intensity of their live jams, extending songs into eight-minute beasts without overdoing it.

Crucially, the grounding of Harrington’s guitar playing brought balance to Jaar’s own music. He had already earned an international fanbase with his woozy, textured approach to electronic music (his early single ‘Mi Mujer’ was being blasted at weird after-parties from California to Coatbridge). But the universal pull of a blues riff brought a kind of pop sensibility that opened the music up to anyone.

Single ‘Paper Trails’ was a sleeper hit. The band were already pulling crowds on the festival circuit. By tightening their music into a tidy three-minute formula, they could become gigantic.

Tame Impala had capitalised on the same thing after the virality of ‘Elephant’ two years before, and made a pop album that went platinum. But that wasn’t the path for Darkside. If anything, the band’s

focus on exploration only made the duo more curious and introspective in their approach. At the height of their success, they broke up, and kept on exploring.

Harrington continued to be a fierce collaborator. Just last year, he released an ambient pop project with Benjamin Jay from Benoit & Sergio, and an instrumental album with Jeremy Gustin and Spencer Zahn. Both are wildly different and expectedly brilliant. Meanwhile, Nicolás Jaar now has perhaps one of the most varied and fruitful discographies in popular music. Since Psychic, he’s released five solo records, two soundtrack albums, two utterly brilliant house albums under the name All Against Logic, and produced material for FKA Twigs’ Magdalene. It’s all stunning.

A lot has happened since Psychic.

That’s true for the world as well as the artists. The venue I first saw them in doesn’t even exist anymore. It seemed like Psychic would be a one-off; rather than becoming a historical footnote or music nerd curio, the album has only become more captivating with time. Like the glowing orb on its cover, it seems alive and alien even now.

That aliveness was made viscerally apparent when the duo released a live album from the Psychic tour last year, revealing the interplay and connection all over again. What seemed like a nice nostalgia trip for fans was signalling the birth of a new record. Fittingly for them, rather than reliving the glory of that first album, Spiral finds new inspiration to dive into.

Spiral is a patient, introspective listen, one that hangs on storytelling more than atmosphere. It’s deeply rewarding.

Like on his recent solo material, Jaar has completely moved away from house on the record. The drum loops that do appear are fractured and lumbering; there’s a focus on organic instruments – acoustic guitar, warm bass, piano and drum kits form the 37 basis of most tracks, alongside custom made instruments that sound like ancient artefacts. The songs themselves are aching ballads and personal musings disguised as twisted rockers. Jaar sings throughout, his voice more upfront than ever.

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Albums The grooves remain downtempo and intimate, but the band are even less afraid to slow the tempo, or to pivot in a new direction. ‘The Question Is To See It All’ breaks into a fingerpicked guitar line at the chorus, backed by a ghostly organ. A minute later, it’s been replaced by panning harmonic finger taps and spiritual hand percussion. The group zoom into the sonic details in the margins without sacrificing the gravitas. On ‘The Limit’, Harrington shrugs out an insanely impressive flamenco-inspired solo that hits just as the track is winding down.

The interplay that epitomised the first album is still integral, of course. Jaar regularly throws to Harrington for a solo.

Like Prince, Harrington is a player who’s cool enough to hide his virtuosic skill if it’ll get in the way of the song. Instead, he’ll play a sinister fragment of a solo, just enough for you to guess the full picture, then reveal pieces over the rest of the track. Opener ‘Narrow Road’ gives us a guitar line like that. It cuts through the track, split into wailing fragments, while Jaar constructs a ballad around it. Just as the climax is reached, the guitar cuts to silence, giving way to a new idea.

Despite the loose, in-the-moment approach, Spiral flows incredibly well.

Darkside perform the high-wire act of making everything feel spontaneous and meticulously planned at the same time.

As a result, each moment reinforces the next, benefitting the whole experience.

Where Psychic aimed for catharsis within individual songs, Spiral widens the scope to the full album. After the melancholic slow-motion dirge of the title track, single ‘Liberty Bell’ feels weightier than it did when it was released, resetting the tension after that moment of calm. This extra patience in terms of structure gives the band a chance to truly flesh out each idea.

Take the track ‘Lawmaker’. It plays like a parable, with Jaar gradually narrating a story of a charlatan doctor who turns into a religious cult leader. It takes the political anxiety of his album Sirens and places it in Darkside’s spiritual setting. It could be preachy if mishandled, and make it sensitive and meditative. Jaar has never been an incredible singer, but

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he’s a human one, able to make a connection by staying restrained and letting the audience move closer to him.

When the peaks do come, they’re stunning. On an album of despondent songs that don’t quite look you in the eye, ‘Inside Is Out There’ embraces you with open arms. The tickly hi-hats that propel the track feel like a giddy reference to the free-jazz break in a ‘Whole Lot of Love’, answered with an exhale of piano chords and gentle hums. It rides that feeling into infinity. As on the rest of the album, the silence and space between the notes are underlined, but there’s a comfort to that silence here.

‘Only Young’ is the big, ballsy closer the album has been secretly pulling towards, on which Harrington plays a huge melancholic solo to tie it all together.

Like the previous track, it indulges in the band’s clear love of rock’s lineage. Doing so reveals that Darkside could well have been rock stars if they chose to be; but as they are, their echo might just last longer.

8/10 Skye Butchard

DJ Manny — Signals In My Head (planet mu) Having made his name a decade ago as a legend of the iconic Chicago footwork scene, DJ Manny has found himself trying to bring back the ecstasy (and the love) to the music. A work years in the making – and impeccably well timed for the reopening of clubs this summer – his latest album, Signals In My Head, might be perfectly placed to do just that.

Evolving from Chicago’s ghetto house and juke scenes, where it was initially put together to soundtrack the incredible dance battles of Chicago from around 2010, the footwork of that city

is lively, rapid music. As in DJ Manny’s previous releases, he draws from this high energy, juke, house and techno infused dance scene, but this time Signals In My Head takes on a softer edge. That’s quite a feat for music that typically runs at 160bpm.

‘Good Love’ starts off with a slow synth before dialling up to a breakneck beat, with euphoric programmed bleeps and outer-space zaps. ‘That Thang’ recalls classic ’90s house, immediately full of a deep, vast energy, with its jazzy synth and turbo drumbeat. Signals In My Head fits right into the classic footwork tradition: a sound that’s so immersive, and so spiritually uplifting. Played in its rightful home (on a heavy soundsystem, in a dark, mobbed club), people can leave their issues at the door and experience the wild relief that comes from dancing to such a high energy sound. It’s an album that couldn’t have come at a better time. 7/10 Cat Gough

Emma-Jean Thackray — Yellow (movementt) A crucial component of Emma-Jean Thackray’s artistry is duality.

This encompasses her deft soundscapes (an unconventional combination of dancefloor-ready beats and free jazz), lyrics that meet at the intersection of cosmic ideology and awakened inner-consciousness, and, most importantly, how the Yorkshire-born multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, and producer operates as a solo artist alongside an ensemble. The cohabitation of such variants in the confines of an hour-long record could culminate in a disjointed vision; however, Thackray’s leadership highlights that, with the right approach, you can achieve equilibrium amongst contrasting ideals.

Albums In doing so, the importance of community has been integral to Thackray’s musical trajectory ever since she took cornet lessons whilst attending primary school. From there, big bands and opera orchestras laid the foundations for her to develop a distinct sound. Despite espousing the worth of collaboration, she has also demonstrated her capabilities of going it alone, as she did with recording her 2018 debut record, Ley Lines. For that release, she played every instrument herself. A few years and two EPs later, the London-based musician is once again in the company of collaborators for her brilliantly vibrant second LP, Yellow.

Released via her own Movementt label (an imprint of Warp), the record, as prefaced by Thackray, is unified by togetherness: “The oneness of all things in the universe, showing love and kindness, human connection.” Opening the record, ‘Mercury’ proceeds with an assault of cymbals that are gradually soothed by a tumbling Rhodes piano melody, heralding the softer moments of Alice Coltrane and Miles Davis’ respective repertoires.

In the final moments of the commanding composition, Thackray’s voice emerges: “To speak, to hear, to know, to love / Our communities are bound by words, by listening.” The influence of the aforementioned Davis, in particular, is abundant across the record. The celestial presence of the Rhodes, a key player on Yellow, lends a tonal sophistication to the theatricality of ‘Green Funk’ and the Steely Dan-like ramblings woven throughout ‘Rahu Ketu.’

While the majority of the arrangements are indebted to the psychedelic sensibilities of the 1970s, the listener is justified in considering the application of such motifs by a variety of contemporary artists.

Namely, Thundercat and his synonymous chaotic flare on ‘Golden Green’, while To Pimp a Butterfly-era Kendrick Lamar is an obvious touchstone on ‘About That’.

In recent years, free jazz has enjoyed a fruitful resurgence amongst a younger generation of artists. Alfa Mist, BadBadNotGood, Kamasi Washington, and Ezra Collective have been rightfully praised for their accomplished expressions within the genre. What makes

Thackray’s contribution to this flourishing new wave noteworthy is her decision to fuse jazz and P-funk-inspired improvisational instrumentation with a strand of dance music usually reserved for dimly-lit bars in boutique hotels. This union only occurs a handful of times. By limiting this unlikely sonic palette to the joyous ‘Say Something’ and ‘Sun’, Thackray refrains from exhausting this idiosyncratic soundscape. When it does appear, the pulsating beats contribute to some of the record’s more visceral moments.

In the case of ‘Sun’, it’s impossible not to envision a venue merging as one, creating a force that mirrors the exuberance of the contagious percussion and choral parts.

Being selective in this way means that the sumptuous production that characterises the album is never contradicted, nor is the cohesion of the work compromised.

Thackray, instead, strikes a perfect balance between the two worlds.

At first glance, Yellow’s resplendent artwork looks like a tarot card.

Surrounded by stars sheltered by a rainbow, a blue woman decorated with symbols depicting nature and the solar system spreads her arms to embrace a rising sun. The image conjures the illusion of a fortuitous omen. In the tracklist, song titles like ‘Venus’, ‘Third Eye’, ‘Rahu Ketu’, along with ‘Mercury in Retrograde’, further strengthen the album’s spiritual grounding. This otherworldliness transcends its aesthetic with the implementation of prayer bowls on ‘May There Be Peace’. Situated at the midpoint, the intense interval takes us into the latter half of the record, where flickers of magic continue to spark.

While there’s plenty of freedom to be enjoyed across the arrangements here, there are moments where certain compositions feel fenced in by an invisible wire. ‘Spectre’ provides a shift in mood, a rare instance of tonal introspection. The steady melody creates a solid base for the lush swirling textures. Here, Thackray and her collaborators forge a comfortable and reassuring atmosphere with the arrangement. However, an opportunity to expand the breadth of the piece and become momentarily enveloped by a wild-

ness was missed. In spite of the abundance of energy and innovation flowing throughout Yellow, it can feel as though the reins are held too firmly across certain movements that would benefit from more ferociousness.

Speaking to Loud And Quiet last year, Thackray hoped Movementt would become a label that puts out music which “people feel is a secret they’re being let in on.” Yellow has the hallmarks of a record you might happen upon after hours of thumbing through miscellaneous LPs at a flea market, whose tonal poise and propensity for experimentation are too invigorating and interesting to keep to yourself. It’s a record best shared in the company of others; a record with which to build a community. 7/10 Zara Hedderman

Faye Webster — I Know I’m Funny Haha (secretly canadian) Faye Webster’s breakthrough third album Atlanta Millionaires Club combined indiecountry with soulful horns and shuffling hip-hop rhythms; a meditation on loneliness and introspection, it was praised for the way it broke musical barriers.

Its follow-up, I Know I’m Funny Haha, finds her in a happier place emotionally, and this has translated into a fuller and more confident sound – but also one that’s retreated into less musically inventive territory. Drawing heavily on ’70s country and lounge music, the Atlanta songwriter uses gentle washes of pedal steel and piano to create a homespun atmosphere.

The languid, intimate tone was informed by her decision to record vocals in her bedroom on Garageband. This informal setting gave her the confidence to be honest, her conversational lyrics

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Albums revealing myriad vulnerabilities. “He left me for someone who looks just like me,” she mourns on the melancholy ‘Sometimes’, while on ‘Cheers’ she worries, “I wonder if we’ll get married before my brother?”

The hushed delivery, through which Webster at times sounds like a less acid Jenny Lewis, has a certain relatability. Its impact is nonetheless lessened by the material’s largely unbroken pace and dreamy cosiness. The exceptions are ‘Cheers’, which is one of the standouts with its grungy, fuzzy psychedelia, and ‘A Stranger’, which has a girl-group-style spoken word section. The acoustic closing track ‘Half Of Me’ is also notable for being a solo recording.

There’s much here to enjoy, but no-one is laughing about how, after its more outward looking predecessor, it feels like a step backwards. 5/10 Susan Darlington

Foodman — Yasuragi Land (hyperdub) Much as time is said to stand still once you travel past the speed of light, footwork has always had a serene quality.

On his new album Yasuragi Land – his first for Hyperdub – Foodman strips away some of the genre’s few thrills to find that tranquil core.

In place of processed claps and skittering drums, Foodman – aka Takahide Higuchi – builds his tracks out of more organic sounding percussion, offset with the strum of an acoustic guitar or gentle plonk of what could be a glockenspiel. The overall sound is loose but rhythmic enough to fill the gaps where bass – noticeably absent from this record – usually sits.

‘Iriguchi’ starts as little more than a scrape of percussion and some horn

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stabs but somehow becomes swooning as choral samples are layered overtop.

Meanwhile, ‘Aji Fly’ bobs along punctuated by cartoonish boings and bloops. The overall feeling is fragmented but never disjointed, and combined with the natural palate of the album, Yasuragi Land feels easy going and almost ambient despite its forays into hyperactivity.

It makes sense then that Higuchi says the record is inspired in part by motorway service stations in Japan. For the producer and DJ, these, alongside local bathhouses, are places of relative relaxation nestled in an ever-shifting landscape. Indeed, the few tracks with English titles are named things such as ‘Food Court’ and ‘Parking Area’.

Occasionally the battle between serenity and speed becomes jarring, such as on ‘Shiboritate’. However, even at its most head-rattling, Yasuragi Land intrigues and delights, with shards of groove emerging from and then dissolving back into the chaos. 8/10 Mike Vinti

Half Waif — Mythopoetics (anti-) Mythopoetics, practically understood, is a mechanism of self-understanding. For Nandi Rose’s fifth solo record as Half Waif, outside her contributions to alt-country rockers Pinegrove, this title is extremely fitting. The record, which she revealed she’s tried to make over the last decade, contains recollections of her childhood, explorations in her pre-emptive fear of loss, and anxieties surrounding selfesteem: “Somebody make me think I might be worth something.”

Since Half Waif ’s 2014 debut Kotekan, she has adopted a more experimental approach with each release, tentatively layering more colours and textures to her electronically-led arrangements.

Mythopoetics, whilst continuing to demonstrate artistic growth, is a record at odds with the excesses of futuristic production and sparsely presented nostalgia. While the enveloping experimental beats and glitchy motifs of ‘Take Away the Ache’ or ‘Party’s Over’ are certainly captivating, it’s the LP’s leaner compositions which reverberate in the psyche longest. Opener ‘Fabric’, for example, constantly entices the listener to deviate from the tracklist. “Have I forgotten how to be alone? I blame you,” Rose intones atop a heartfelt piano accompaniment.

Within the context of the record, this song is singular in its minimalism, although pop ballad ‘Sourdough’ and album closer ‘Powder’ also do well to provide breathing room.

For the most part, this record presents challenging, universal themes amplified by an exuberant portfolio of dense electro-pop bangers. While Rose’s lyricism is informed by defining chapters in her life, the opulent soundscapes take a page from the songbooks of numerous artists from Perfume Genius to Charli XCX and St Vincent to Mitski. The overall dynamism of Mythopoetics makes for a rewarding exercise in self-reflection.

6/10 Zara Hedderman

Lucy Dacus — Home Video (matador) Fans of Lucy Dacus can rejoice, for a sad girl album has been bestowed unto them.

Dacus’ Home Video is a deeply personal record steeped in the memories of her childhood and adolescence in Richmond, Virginia. This bildungsroman-album plays like a book of poetry devoted to teenagehood, but in a way that is affectionate and benevolent to Dacus’ past self

Albums in all her flaws and glory. Fellow boygenius musicians Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker make appearances on a few of the tracks, giving the album a familiar sound.

But, just when listeners might be sinking into the known, Dacus surprises us with sonic techniques not usually in her repertoire. In particular, the use of autotune in ‘Partner in Crime’ is an unexpected but a very welcome turn of events, and this track is one of the best on the record.

The heavy emphasis on poetry is typical of Dacus, and this album only adds to her prestige as a musician whom I believe is a fantastic characterization of American music. Her at-times folky sound, mixed with remnants of ’80s pop and tied up with allusions to God and burgeoning love, adds her to a history of top American musicians, joining a songwriting tradition alongside the likes of Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty.

Lyrics take a front seat on this album, and to appreciate them fully, fans should listen carefully to ‘VBS’ and ‘Triple Dog Dare’. The former’s interaction with religion and the latter’s Huck Finn daydream translate the experience of adolescence tenderly and effectively.

7/10 Isabel Crabtree

Janette King — What We Lost (hot tramp) If there’s anything negative to say about this debut record from Janette King, it’s that it might actually sound too good for its own good; the slick production and R&B stylings, which have one foot in the genre’s ’90s pomp but with clever inflections that update it for the present day, are so easy on the ear that it’d be easy to just let What We Lost wash over you.

Really dig into it, though, and there’s genuine depth too, with the

Montreal singer-songwriter serving up a highly personal treatise on loss that confronts her own struggles (the Maryze collaboration ‘Mirror’), those of her friends (closer ‘Found a Way’, a stirring reflection on addiction) and those of the world at large (‘Change’ was written during last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests). King wears her influences firmly on her sleeve – there’re flashes of Aaliyah on ‘You Don’t Love Me’, Jill Scott on ‘Mars’, the off-kilter leanings of Erykah Badu on ‘Caught in Smoke’ – but the title track’s neat nod to house music positions her closer to contemporaries like Jorja Smith. This is a hugely promising debut.

8/10 Joe Goggins

John Grant — Boy From Michigan (bella union) “Forty years later,” John Grant is crooning in that stately, oakaged baritone, “and I’m still trying to run.” In the decade since his remarkable solo debut Queen of Denmark, Grant has sketched out the legacies of trauma – of running away and running to – across five records that burrowed from lush ’70s orchestration to more throbbing, nocturnal comedown colours. What we have here is more of the latter, coupled with his heaviest slab of memoir yet. It is autobiographical and requires stamina, its chapters coming in routinely at seven minutes.

The album was recorded last year with Cate Le Bon, and the Welsh avant-pop auteur has left her mark most keenly on the off-kilter buzz of ‘Rhetorical Figure’ and on the vocoder-led ‘Best of Me’, which is witty and warm. It’s the nine-minute ‘The Only Baby’, however, that justifies the entire project – returning, at the end, to the sonic palette that informed his debut, it’s a gorgeously

observed working-through of personal and national demons, with one eye on the White House at all times. Though engaging, the sonic sparsity, emotional selfreference and sheer length underlines one thing: how much you’ll get out of this record depends on your investment in the life of this particular boy from Michigan.

7/10 Fergal Kinney

Kojaque — Town’s Dead (soft boy) A sense of place can be vital in rap music. For Kojaque, Dublin fulfils that role. Town’s Dead, the sharp, poetic release from Ireland’s most rightly lionised rapper, is built on dispatches from an inevitably crap, unplanned New Year’s Eve in the city, where nobody’s gaff is vacant of mums, and “town” is mercilessly blacklisted with a wily line from Kojaque that sticks out of his mouth like a cigarette hanging loose.

But as the album progresses, the night somehow still ends up being something.

Kojaque’s arrangements are disarmingly galvanising. The milky, jazzy beats can set off in one direction with a smoky sax line, a fluid piano score, or a playful zigzag of synth, before thrashing you with spinout guitar crescendos, subdued air horns or a WhatsApp recording.

This is a visceral portrait of Kojaque’s city: a place that incites a corrosive frustration in being working class, latent with talent and subject to the grinding neoliberal forces that mean you can’t make rent on the same street you grew up in. On tracks like ‘Fallin For It’ and ‘Wickid Tongues’, Kojaque’s lines put you right in the creeping claustrophobia of Dublin like you’re living it. In ‘No Hands’, memories hang in the air, can needle you, as Kojaque takes you back to his singleparent childhood, dangling his feet on the

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Albums church pews, and forward again to New Year’s, asking his late dad if he’s proud.

And it’s not the words alone that transfix: few albums this year can be as potent as this. 9/10 Cat Gough

Mykki Blanco — Broken Hearts and Beauty Sleep (transgressive) For the best part of a decade, rapper, poet and performance artist Mykki Blanco has been tearing down boundaries in hip-hop and underground culture. However, despite their constant innovation and singlemindedness, Blanco is yet to release a truly all-encompassing full-length project.

Arriving five years after their official debut album Mykki, Blanco’s new mini-album is the closest they’ve come yet.

Executive produced by FaltyDL, and featuring contributions from Blood Orange, Hudson Mohawke, Big Freedia, Kari Faux and others, Broken Hearts and Beauty Sleep ties together the many threads of Blanco’s work. Rooted in rap, the record unfurls over nine tracks to incorporate slow jams, dance music, spoken word and much more.

Lead single ‘Free Ride’ is pure euphoria distilled into a pop song, with a hook that demands to be blasted while driving at high speeds in the open-topped vehicle of your choice. Meanwhile, breezy pop-trap number ‘Summer Fling’ with Kari Faux features the lines: “He told me J. Cole saved rap, well how about that / I told him your dick smells like hamsters, go take a bath” – which should be enough to make it a hit if Faux’s bubblegum chorus isn’t (it definitely is).

Occasionally Blanco falters, as on the minute-a-half ‘F*ck Your Choices’, which is essentially a lover’s quarrel over a beat. Similarly, the Latin-tinged

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‘Want From Me’ with Bruno Ribeiro feels disjointed and never quite finds its groove.

All is forgiven by the time Big Freedia appears on closing track ‘That’s Folks’, though. Spooky stabs of piano form the spine of a bouncing instrumental, with Blanco and Freedia taking turns to shout out their titular ‘folks’ with all the energy of a Southern rap classic. 7/10 Mike Vinti

Liars — The Apple Drop (mute) Angus Andrew seems to be wrestling with something profound and unsettling in his relationship with himself on this tenth Liars album. “They told me I’m a juiced up, worn out sad sack / I can’t figure out what I’m trying to do here, except stand around and be a dick,” he sings on ‘Sekwar’, while muscular drumbeats and ominous digital scribbles whirl overhead. The song only seems to get darker the longer it lasts, as does the album around it.

The first truly collaborative Liars album for some years, The Apple Drop makes strong use of avant-garde drummer Laurence Pike and multi-instrumentalist Cameron Deyell’s incendiary energy, but it is hard to shake loose from the notion that we are listening in on some dark soulsearching. “People are born, now they all long to die again,” Andrew sings on ‘Slow and Turn Inward’, a track that unfurls itself slowly like a gradual realisation of some harrowing, pervasive universal truth, a little like a demonic version of the Newton apple story to which the record’s title seems to allude.

Between the strained, manic mood of ‘Star Search’ and the jittery paranoia of ‘From What the Never Was’, Liars show that even after two decades they are still capable of urgent, intense musical expres-

sion, still hungry to find new ground to mill. There may not be anything to match the career high spots of ‘The Other Side of Mt. Heart Attack’ or ‘Mess on a Mission’, but Liars continue to quietly amass one of the most compelling bodies of work in modern music. 7/10 Max Pilley

Laura Mvula — Pink Noise (atlantic) Laura Mvula has joked that she “came out of the womb wearing shoulder pads.”

Given the tone of her third album, Pink Noise, that could be true. It’s packed with the classic sounds of mid-’80s pop: sparkly synths, a super-tight rhythm section and huge production.

It’s a style she trialled on this February’s 1/f, an EP that reworked songs from her back catalogue that shed their acoustic orchestration. The sonic reinvention marked her return to the industry after being dropped by Sony in 2017 following The Dreaming Room.

Being burned by the industry resulted in a crisis of faith. She considered quitting music, composed for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and it was only when she freed herself from pressure that songs started to flow. The result is the album she claims she always wanted to make.

It lacks the stylistic ambition of her previous releases, which drew on her degree in classical composition, but the ten tracks have a sense of freedom. There’s a strong debt to Prince’s funk-pop (the title track), Michael Jackson’s Bad (‘Got Me’), and even Beyonce’s R&B-inflected pop-soul (‘Remedy’).

Sometimes Pink Noise does stray towards MOR, especially on ‘Magical’ and ‘What Matters’, but Mvula’s soulful, powerhouse delivery imbues the material with substance. She unashamedly mines

Albums the neon brassiness of the ’80s, as opposed to the Studio 54 disco sound that the likes of Dua Lipa have recently revived. It’s not always that cool, but it at least sounds as if she’s letting her hair down and having fun.

6/10 Susan Darlington

Lightning Bug — A Color of the Sky (fat possum) Brooklyn band Lightning Bug have kept a relatively low profile until now. Though their first two albums, 2016’s Floaters and 2019’s October Song, received plenty of critical accolades, they remain largely unknown beyond a small circle of dedicated followers. Not that they mind that necessarily, with their notably languid and organic approach to making music.

But with the release of this third album, their first on Fat Possum, it’s hard to imagine the band will maintain their underground status.

A Color of the Sky takes a bulk of its inspiration from a kite festival in Washington that singer Audrey Kang visited in 2019, and this has manifested in a bright and spacious piece of work which is as uplifting as it is contemplative. Having grown from three to five members, with the addition of their touring members Dane Hagen and Vincent Puleo, this album is more cohesive, and even more richly textured than the band’s previous output. Recorded in the Catskills, a mountain range in upstate New York, the music seems to reflect some of that beautiful wilderness, combining shoegaze, folk and Americana delicately and expertly. Whilst their sound has grown more ambitious, Kang’s vocal is hushed and introspective as ever. There are plenty of tearjerkers here, in particu-

lar ‘September Song Pt II’, a sequel to October Song’s ‘September Song’ (keep up), as well as the title track, with its glimmering string-laden outro. The record is an oasis of calm – lie back and imagine kites floating overhead. 8/10 Jessica Wrigglesworth

sure, it’s an album that makes demands as it busily contorts the modern with the analogue in the best kind of contradictions, but when you’re armed with tracks that are always on the attack, why worry?

It’s on everyone else to try and keep up.

8/10 Reef Younis

LoneLady — Former Things (warp) New city. New equipment. New songwriting processes. A lot changed in Julie Campbell’s world for album number three, but her ability to create innovative, invigorating, elastically creative music remains undimmed.

Whether armed with a guitar and drum machine or ditching the Telecaster in favour of a few synthesizers and hardware, she constantly finds ways to build, clash and coax a patchwork of artful noise that sounds like she’s packed in a wardrobe somewhere, an array of instruments close at hand, corralling and conducting a brilliantly scatty symphony.

Here, her solitary process of writing, performing and recording everything bursts through with a fun, taut intensity – a jittery but tangible kind of genius that unravels all of the threads, and instinctively knows which one to pull and when. It’s there on the jerky time signatures and chunky staccato piano of ‘Time Time Time’, in the sweet funk and ‘Blue Monday’ percussive slaps on ‘Fear Colours’, and gets weird on the squelching electronica and syncopated neon groan of ‘Threats’.

But for all of the avant-garde, eight-bit gyrations, Former Things is packed tight with ideas. It’s Campbell in her groove, playing with her new toys, bang in the middle of a vortex that involves you as much as it does her. And

Peyton — PSA (stones throw) Peyton’s musical identity stands on the twin pillars of heritage and geography. Her grandmother, Houston gospel composer and Grammy Award-nominated songwriter Theola Booker, helped to cultivate Peyton’s musicality, and her childhood blazed with vocal performances in torrid Texan churches and classical ensemble performances. PSA, the Houston-based singer-songwriter’s debut album, is an ode to the lynchpins of both her sound and her selfhood: her upbringing and her home state of Texas.

Nowhere is this brought to life more than on the album’s second track, ‘Let it Flow,’ a track that is, at its heart, about self-reliance, about trusting yourself and your own intuition. Layered drum machine beats, synths and backing vocals lend an air of quiet confidence to the track, which is only thrown into sharper relief as Peyton tells herself – and her listeners – “It’ll be alright / Oh, time to let it go,” with a choral persistence that is impossible to ignore. Indeed, self-love and an appreciation for her roots lace all of Peyton’s songs, from the summery hopefulness of ‘Don’t U Wanna Fly’ to the album’s closing track, a cover of Gene Wilder’s ‘Pure Imagination’, brought to life with a contemporary Texan twist.

Throughout and at its conclusion, PSA radiates self-assuredness, and it’s really refreshing. 8/10 Rosie Ramsden

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Albums

Zoee — Flaw Flower (illegal data) Forward-thinking label Illegal Data return with the debut album from London-based artist Zoee, following releases with tastemaker label Plz Make It Ruins, and vocal appearances for the likes of Hot Chip.

Perhaps the most notable feature was on ‘Hey QT’, the brainchild of PC Music head A. G. Cook and late sonic pioneer Sophie. The track perfectly distilled the growing ethos of the aforementioned artists, dissecting commercial pop tropes and expanding them to breaking point, the reconfigured mass at once profoundly beautiful and bewilderingly hilarious – or should that be bewilderingly beautiful and profoundly hilarious?

Unfortunately, this sense of aesthetic malleability hasn’t extended to Zoee’s latest release. Replacing the pop maximalism is a form of tepid café fodder, all lightweight guitar strums and inoffensively whimsical synth work. The familiar knowing naivety remains across the vocal performances and lyrics, but it fails to land over the middling production. The paper-thin reflections on love and loss are screaming for the lush bombast of euphoric pop, or the intimate beauty of lo-fi, but without the emotional weight of either, it is difficult to be swept up within it all.

The observational approach of ‘Best Man Speech’ is a heavy misfire, finding neither the humour or the beauty in its documentation of the banality of life and memory. “I remember we once went for lunch at Little Chef, but the service was terrible, but you were too polite to complain” is almost impressive in its emptiness, but really the lines do nothing more than grate.

The project is perfectly listenable for the most part, but doesn’t extend

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beyond or beneath that MOR standpoint, and that is perhaps where it falters most; at no point am I thrown off-course by a majestic chord change, or some jarring sound design. That said, there are moments of intrigue such as the distant detuned backing chimes of ‘Evening Primrose’ that bring to mind Tin Drumera Japan, a subtle melodic counterpoint that lightly subverts the emotional lilt of the track. Unfortunately these moments are few and far between, and there is not a lingering feeling that repeat listens will uncover new insights. The line between irony and sincerity is as blurred as you’d expect, but this time that blur offers little excitement or insight. 4/10 Oskar Jeff

LUMP — Animal (partisan) Two albums in, it’s still a puzzle as to whether LUMP’s existence is about dichotomy, duality or a mind-twisting combination of the two. It’s not unfathomable that Laura Marling and Mike Lindsay’s creative worlds are constantly colliding but, conversely, LUMP are arguably at their most interesting when they sound worlds apart.

Following their eponymous 2018 debut, Animal continues the “half cute, half dark and creepy” dynamic the duo set out to create. Title track ‘Animal’ is sombre and withdrawn, ‘Climb Every Wall’ and ‘We Cannot Resist’ drift into the woozy melodic weirdness of English Riviera-era Metronomy, and ‘Paradise’ gives Animal some of its few peaks and troughs as Lindsay moves through the kinds of stretched melodies and time signatures that make his band Tunng’s folktronica so curiously listenable.

As ‘Bloom at Night’ floats along some mysterious, dreamy instrumen-

tation, the overriding mood across the album is one of a functioning coexistence, but also an intentional sense of distance.

And while it gives Animal a reserved fascination, it also feels a little impassive – a kind of Margate Twin Peaks.

And so we come full circle. Perhaps the only reason LUMP work so well is because of their push-pull process: a creative speed date less concerned with maintaining a spark, and more about capturing a little bit of magic. 7/10 Reef Younis

Mabe Fratti — Será Que Ahora Podremos Entendernos? (unheard of hope) This is a remarkable piece of work from Guatemalan composer Mabe Fratti.

Her fluid, cyclical cello arrangements, interwoven with brittle synths, featherlight percussion and painterly dabs of vocal melody, move at a stately pace through the warm, clean atmosphere of Será Que Ahora Podremos Entendernos?, graceful and reassuring.

Created during a stay at an artist space near Mexico City, forcibly extended due to the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020, much of the album is improvised, kernels of ideas developed from collaborations with fellow residents in the space instigated by the lack of much else to do. Not that you’d guess that anything was left to accident or serendipity – every note feels carefully-placed, each movement adding something important to the intricate web Fratti spins throughout.

More accurate perhaps to say that the underlying spontaneity of many of the tracks here lends them a certain organic quality, the slow thaw of ‘Inicio Vínculo Final’ being a case in point: this is music that breathes.

Albums The record’s title translates in English to Will We Be Able to Understand Each Other Now? Only time will tell, but if the connections that created music like this are anything to go by, we can be somewhat optimistic. 8/10 Luke Cartledge

Spellling — The Turning Wheel (sacred bones) Spellling’s new double album The Turning Wheel marks a transition from Chrystia Cabral’s intense focus on synths towards the coming of age of a talented, organized and fullyfledged music producer. Here, audiences encounter an artist undaunted by wrangling 31 musicians, orchestral lines and fitting the pieces of a complex puzzle together to create a cohesive project.

While listening to the new album, taking in sound effects like fireworks and sirens, jazzy, winding piano riffs and Cabral’s pouty-mouthed, sweet with an element of the unhinged vocals, it’s clear that the record is supposed to be a story, a world created anew. However, there seems to be a wall between artist and audience, something stopping listeners from being fully immersed in the world-building that no doubt took many painstaking hours to create. This could be due to the presence of some filler tracks – perhaps the album didn’t really need to be a double.

There are a few great moments, including the first song; this trippy story called ‘Little Deer’ is refreshing and intriguing. A windy, wailing soundscape opens the album, pulling listeners down a fantastical rabbit-hole. It feels like entering a new world, that’s for sure, like getting swept up in a convincing movie or musical, but when Cabral starts singing things take an even more interesting

turn. The song’s strength lies in the beautiful and unexpected horn section, which acts as a wonderful foil to the Kate Bushesque cooing and warbling.

The real winner is the title track, ‘Turning Wheel’. Background vocals create a swelling chorus from which Cabral’s unique voice strikes out, then blends with, then strikes out on her own again. It’s also the most catchy song, with a beat that is compulsively headnoddable. 6/10 Isabel Crabtree

Molly Burch — Romantic Images (captured tracks) On Molly Burch’s fourth record, the Texan singer-songwriter makes the jump, broadly, from the ’60s to the ’80s. That means the twangy Roy Orbison guitars of 2018’s First Flower have been replaced by pulsing synths, slapback drums make way for something drier and sleeker, and Burch’s torchsinger croon adds a breathy, hiccuping and girlish dimension somewhere between Janet Jackson, Cyndi Lauper and Mariah Carey. What has endured, though, is Burch’s knack for a melody: the topline of ‘Heart of Gold’ skips around its arrangement with a filigree playfulness, and the second-half run of ‘Took a Minute’, ‘Emotion’, and ‘Honeymoon Phase’, a trio of propulsive, breezily Daft Punkian pop songs that are as effortless as they are addictive, house more hooks than most top-40 albums do in their entirety.

Having proved her chops, then, it’s a shame Burch doesn’t carry them across the rest of Romantic Images. Instead, low-stakes rhythmic experiments fall somewhat flat, and the occasional recourse to ’60s jangle breaks the nostalgic spell cast by the album’s highlights.

It’s easy to imagine the best of Roman-

tic Images soundtracking John Hughes high-school movies perfectly, not least the ‘Lucky Star’-era Madonna bubblegum of ‘Games’; that the rest is harder to love makes it an album apt for Spotify pruning. 6/10 Sam Walton

Theo Alexander — Sunbathing Through A Glass Screen (arts & crafts) In many ways, there’s an awful lot to like about Sunbathing Through A Glass Screen, the new album from Chinese-British minimalist composer Theo Alexander. The elegant, tidy piano loops and overarching strings that make up much of the record’s substance are put together with real skill, crystalline production framing them simply and effectively. There are instances of genuinely breath-taking beauty here, particularly in the album’s first half, with the mesh of organ and droplet-like keys on opener ‘Accidental Enlightenment’, the locust swarm of arpeggios and scratchy bow strokes towards the back end of ‘Deathly Bronze’ standing out especially.

The problem is, though, that the clear technical competence of Sunbathing Through A Glass Screen is too often used in the service of compositions that aren’t so much flatly uninventive as stiflingly, guardedly polite. It’d be a bit harsh to accuse Alexander of completely playing it safe, but it does feel like there’s a reluctance to challenge or subvert on this album. It’s full of perfectly serviceable post-Reich layering and earnest, reverb-heavy atmospherics, but the cumulative effect has more in common with the soundtrack to a high-class gallery opening than the unsettling experimentation of the mid-20th-century minimalist movement from which

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Albums Alexander his drawing audible (if sanitised) inspiration. It’s a shame, as there’s clearly a very capable artist behind this stuff – with a bit more mischief or nerve, this could be a special album.

Sunbathing Through A Glass Screen has its moments, but ultimately feels like a holding pattern for something more exciting. 5/10 Luke Cartledge

Pom Pom Squad — Death of a Cheerleader (city slang) Death of a Cheerleader is a record that works on a couple of levels. At face value, the songs here, with their palm-muted guitars and crowd-pleasing pop hooks, are a pleasant-enough throwback to those late’90s alternative-rock acts that plastered the walls of high school bedrooms all over the world.

As with all good subversive art, these influences are only a framework for something lying deeper below the surface.

As a queer person of colour growing up in predominately white spaces, Mia Berrin, Pom Pom Squad’s lead singer, always felt a constant awareness of how others perceived her. So, while the music might be grunge-era nostalgia, Berrin uses her lyrics to hold up a mirror to a scene that preaches individualism but rewards conformity, through music created by people of colour that’s now packaged in a way that makes people of colour feel odd for loving it.

Don’t get me wrong – this record is definitely a bit of a curate’s egg. Personally speaking, I struggled at first to break through the crust of Avril Lavigne-esque mall rock to find the meaning underneath. But honestly, stick with it; Death of a Cheerleader really does have something important to say. 6/10 Dominic Haley

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Torres — Thirstier (merge) It’s long felt like Torres has been on the cusp of a superstardom that’s so far managed to evade her. After she was dropped by 4AD in 2018 it seemed like the songwriter also known as Mackenzie Scott was in danger of losing it all – she described that period as the hardest of her life, during which she considered quitting music entirely.

It was heartening, then, to see her sign to another esteemed indie, Merge, for 2020’s Silver Tongue, a record which understatedly regained her the critical and commercial foothold she’d been forced into scrambling for. Now, Thirstier builds upon that foundation; ambitious and unabashed, it’s the sound of an artist casting off any concern for others’ expectations.

Though she’s hardly been a wallflower on previous records, Thirstier is by some distance Scott’s most brazen work yet. Opener ‘Are You Sleepwalking?’ lurches along with a satisfying Hole-like grunt, before sidestepping into a jittery, syncopated chorus; lead single ‘Don’t Go Puttin Wishes In My Head’ is a glorious power-pop stomper that improves on every listen, achieving the near-impossible by both sounding like Springsteen and not being embarrassing dad-rock bollocks.

It doesn’t all entirely work – the title track is overly reliant on a guitar line that sounds like nothing so much as Take That’s ‘Patience’, and ‘Big Leap’ is a little too earnest for its own good – but by the time we get to the propulsive final run-in of ‘Kiss The Corners’, ‘Hand In The Air’ and ‘Keep The Devil Out’, it’s hard not to be moved by the record’s spirit, and you’re unlikely to hear a hookier record this year. A megastar move. 7/10 Luke Cartledge

Tkay Maidza — Last Year Was Weird, Vol. 3 (4ad) As a keen numerologist, it’s appropriate that Tkay Maidza chose to chunk-up 24 new songs into a neat triptych of eighttrack EPs this past three years.

Broadly they’ve all been reflections on 2016 – the rapper and singer’s “weirdest year” – but each has been sonically distinguishable from another.

So where 2018’s Vol. 1 felt like Maidza debuting a new, less dance-y sound and 2020’s Vol. 2 fizzed with Missy Elliot-esque jams like ‘Shook’ and ‘24K’, Vol. 3 feels, in part, like the wind down, the all-back-to-mine-afterthe-club vibe.

Speaking to Loud And Quiet last year, she outlined her vision for the project, an exploration of her own African-Australian experience. “I’m just trying to figure out who I am. So, it’s just everyday: everyday people, just mutual experiences, love and friends and that kind of stuff,” she said. “This felt like the place I could do it without anyone judging what I said.”

By this point Tkay is comfortable switching between her skills – she sings with a spectacularly soulful voice and delivers raps with a devastating flow.

The two best tracks here exhibit those interchangeable talents – ‘Cashmere’ is a cwtchy R&B tune that wouldn’t sit out of place on Ariana Grande’s Thank U, Next. And ‘Kim’ – where she joins up with U.S. rapper Yung Baby Tate – is the sort of crunchy grime tune that you can envisage igniting crowd pandemonium at her live shows (Tkay’s known for climbing stage furniture, crowd surfing and generally causing mayhem). ‘High Beams’ falls into that category, too – a test of your soundsystem’s low-end

Albums bass capabilities. The rest though is less combative – like the summery, piano-based opener ‘Eden’ and the cosy R&B of ‘Onto Me’ featuring neo-soul singer UMI. Following those, the gently funky ‘So Cold’ feels indebted to either Jamiroquai or The Internet – depending on how old and how cool you are.

After twenty quick minutes it all ends with the self-reflective ‘Breath’ – which feels like Tkay taking a restorative break after the creative flurry of the past few years. “Why don’t we just stay here?”, she sings, as if needing a moment to pause and collect her thoughts. Vol. 3 might bookend this chapter of Tkay’s career on a mellower note – lyrically this collection feels much breezier – but no doubt there’s fire to spare in her belly.

7/10 Greg Cochrane

Throwing Snow ­— Dragons (houndstooth) Armed with a Masters in Creative Music Technology and a degree in Physics and Astrophysics, Ross Tones aka Throwing Snow isn’t afraid of pushing a concept. On his 2017 album Embers, Tones created a digital cycle of life, death and rebirth where the building blocks of the opening track underpinned the entire album, creating an infinite loop that ultimately recycles itself. Dragons doesn’t click down to that cyclical level, but piqued by an interest in archaeoacoustics (examining the acoustics of archaeological sites and artifacts), it’s still a physical, highly technical listen of reverent rhythms, biting percussion, and modern electronica that blurs the lines between science and ancestry.

‘Lithics’, released earlier this year, gave some indication of what was to come.

Taking a few of the traditional instruments

he was learning, Tones rechanneled them to emulate more modern counterparts – an Irish Bodhrán became an 808 kick; the Middle Eastern Daff became a snare; and the Indian Esraj became a melodic string piece put through a few different pedals.

That juxtaposition comes to life throughout with tracks such as ‘Purr’, rewired with some of those same percussive traditional instruments, sitting next to the bright, stuttering melody of ‘Halos’, the snarling electronica of ‘Brujita’ and the twostep snap of ‘Equitem Nocte’. Elsewhere, ‘Traveller’ combines shades of Gold Panda with raining synth drama, ‘Lithurgy’ lurches through an eight-bit dreamscape, and ‘Ochre’ brings a familiar, dissonant growl.

Whether you listen to Dragons as an abstract lesson in music folklore and history or simply a measure of how much one artist can create with just a handful of elements, strip back the conceptual complexity, and these tracks still stalk and snarl. With this much guttural power, Throwing Snow’s sweet science continues to be an essential listen – that Palaeolithic brain of yours will thank you. 8/10 Reef Younis

Hypnotic Brass Ensemble — This Is a Mindfulness Drill (jagjaguwar) The great indie label catalogue revival is in full season as Mercury enters retrograde for the second time this year (which friends tell me is an excellent moment to reflect upon the past, with the universe rewarding patience and understanding).

In March this year, four decades of 4AD signalled in the mammoth compilation Bills & Aches & Blues, where their starsof-new – the likes of Dry Cleaning, Maria Somerville and Tkay Maidza – reimagined their favourite parts of the label’s history, from Pixies to His Name Is Alive.

15 years behind them in time alone comes Jagjaguwar, gathering pace, with this discreet-at-first glance – but vital – offering as part of their own “JAG25” birthday celebrations.

Hypnotic Brass Ensemble’s This Is a Mindfulness Drill is a quietly contemplative song-for-song rework of Richard Youngs’ 1998 album Sapphie: a record of remarkable purity and solace, originally released on Oblique Recordings before being picked up by Jagjaguwar at the turn of the century. Its three tracks of sparse classical guitar and voice span 37 minutes with a droning brittleness, never needless, both weightless yet battered and bruised, heart-breaking yet life-affirming for the folk revivalists and ambient auteurs alike. It’s the kind of record whose meditative brilliance you wonder and worry might escape you today, should 20 years of repeat listening be so inexorably woven into an album’s being that time is the only spade needed to bury an underground classic.

Enlisting the help of Moses Sumney, Perfume Genius and Sharon Van Etten, Hypnotic Brass Ensemble’s covers build on the original’s gentle fingerpicking into an abounding brass lull, always one restrained moment away from ecstasy. Sumney’s craquelure falsetto dismisses the modesty of ‘Soon It Will Be Fire’ for a concerto, turning exposition into an immediate soft centrepiece.

The solitary sage at the heart of Youngs’ ‘A Fullness of Light In Your Soul’ is transformed from “Your picture is still on my wall”-era Daniel Johnston with Mike Hadreas’s gentle confidence, while Van Etten’s still vocals on ‘The Graze of Days’ swarm into mandatory deep listening.

Throughout a remarkable tribute, the only misjudged element is the edited album title. Across a record heralded as one of the most important, unheard treasures of the last half decade of the twentieth century, what breaks through now is no less a mystery than it was then. Even framed in communality, in contradiction to Youngs’ solitary masterpiece, this rework of Sapphie still feels like a deeply personal thing, leagues beyond some cake and candles. 9/10 Tristan Gatward

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Albums Live Sharon Van Etten Zebulon, Los Angeles 17 April 2021

Sharon Van Etten first set foot in the Zebulon Café after moving back to her parents’ home in New Jersey, following the breakup of an abusive relationship in Tennessee. In mid-’00s Williamsburg, the venue provided her with a community of like-minded musicians and collaborators, and the courage she needed to take herself seriously as an artist while she was still working a day job at Ba Da Bing! Records. It was during this period of creative exploration that she began working on Epic, her breakthrough second album, which celebrated its tenth birthday last year.

Zebulon has since relocated – like Van Etten herself – to LA, but it remains close to her heart. “A venue is so much more than a pub where people go to listen to music and drink,” she says in the short documentary precluding this livestream gig in aid of Zebulon, and in celebration of Epic’s anniversary.

“It’s where ideas happen, it’s where personalities take shape and musicians meet, and collaborate and grow and change and thrive.” The importance of live music, especially in times of crisis, is at the core of the performance, and

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Van Etten seems genuinely humbled, thrilled and a little overwhelmed to be playing a live show – even if there’s no one in the audience. Any shakiness is cast aside once she starts playing though. Backed by a masked band of five, she performs Epic in its entirety, in order, without interruption.

Epic was a quintessential breakup album, filled with rage, tenderness, and reckoning. As Van Etten performs it now, she is light years away from the person who wrote that album – a person we see snippets of during the documentary; an earnest, somewhat timid young woman who has clearly been shaken by her recent trauma. Now, she commands the stage quietly but confidently, a result of a decade of playing in increasingly huge venues as her career has gone from strength to strength. Nevertheless, it’s clear that she has an immense amount of respect and empathy for that past incarnation – the arrangements are left as they were, and she has avoided adding any extra instrumentation or flourishes, or playing any of her newer, better known tracks.

Whether playing a small venue, a huge festival or a livestream, Van Etten’s ability to imbue her performance with emotion is unfaltering and part of what makes her such a compelling artist to watch. While Epic may lack the grand, cinematic quality of her recent albums,

it is not wanting in emotional depth. As she rattles through the 30-minute set, she channels vulnerability, indignance, and optimism in equal measures, and with extreme conviction. By the time the harmonium-heavy album closer ‘Love More’ arrives, there isn’t a dry eye in the room – on either side of the screen. Written as an optimistic end to a heart-wrenching album, the track sees Van Etten realising that the hardship she has endured has ultimately led to her desire to do as the title suggests. After a gruelling year, it feels like a message we could all use. Jessica Wrigglesworth

Aga Ujma Shacklewell Arms 24 May 2021

With her sugary, heavily accented vocals, elfish grin and whimsical stage outfit, it’s hard not to be reminded of Björk when watching Aga Ujma. As far as comparisons go, it’s not a bad one, but the Polish artist has many more strings to her bow. Quite literally – of the three instruments she plays throughout the course of this solo set, two are stringed: the harp and its close relative, the sasando. The latter is Indonesian, as is the gender barung on which she begins the show, a sort of giant, ornate xylophone. Ujma has spent extended periods in Indonesia, studying gamelan (traditional Javanese ensemble music), and now applies its unusual rhythmic structures to her own compositions, which are equally inspired by the folk music of her home country. The combination makes for surprising melodies, and a truly unique sound.

For many in the back venue of this East London pub, this is the first gig in months, if not a year, and there’s a palpable buzz, but Ujma manages to silence the room within seconds of starting. The set is split into three parts, one for each instrument, and she

Albums Live plays each as deftly as the last. Singing in a mix of Polish and English, she’s a captivating performer; giggling one moment and wiping tears from her eyes the next, evidently feeling the emotions of her lyrics, which – among the ones I understand – are playful and heartfelt and searingly honest. The audience seem spellbound and the show ends with rapturous applause – which she receives charmingly, running coyly offstage before popping her head back out again with a grin.

There’s something magical about watching her in this very intimate setting, but Ujma seems capable and deserving of conquering much larger audiences than this. Jess Wrigglesworth

Black Midi Hackney Church, London 28 May 2021

Lost the plot? Hogwash and balderdash! Black Midi’s magick was always that they jumped the shark before they released any music, descended into preposterousness from the get-go.

They have been off-piste from the very off, and new album Cavalcade is their biggest left turn yet. Love songs about long-dead silent film stars, winding prog and showy jazz fusion, Primuscore lead singles – it swats aside Schlagenheim’s winning formula in search of something totally new.

Head to toe in chef whites, checked trousers, Black Midi scuttle onstage ready to get cooking. Joined tonight by Seth Evans on keys and Kaidi Akinnibi on the sax, they are now a firebreathing quintet, and it suits them damn well. They stand on the Hackney Church stage to deliver a sermon of fireand-brimstone noise.

Our preachermen for the evening open with a quick one-two of the 21st Century Fox theme film studio tune, and the Blue Peter theme tune, before segueing into ‘Dethroned’. The sound

is droney and echoey; the reverb is so thick you can bite it.

Geordie Greep imps around, swaggering and shredding simultaneously, his stage mannerisms a goblin take on rock bravado as he shreds back to back with Akinnibi and bassist Cameron Picton in an earth-sparking rendition of ‘Chondro’. This, and a blues interlude that sees Akinnibi channel his inner Howlin’ Wolf as he gives his gravelly vocal chords a workout, are the heaviest moments on show; the Schlagenheim bombast is replaced by something a bit more subtle, in which ‘John L’ and ‘Hogwash’ don’t make a set list of entirely new material.

‘Marlene Dietrich’ is a beautiful number that fills the church hall with the angelic chorus of finger-picked guitars, whilst ‘Ascending Forth’ is more of the same, dragging out Dionysian prog ecstasy over ten minutes of encore.

This current incarnation of Black Midi is a delight, surprises at every corner, the camp and obscene embraced at every turn. Their set sprawls nearly 90 minutes, and every second is exquisite. A very special group tonight began their second cycle. Cal Cashin

India Jordan Colour Factory, London 22 May 2021

plenty of people, many of whom are likely getting physical with each other.

Hearing Jordan DJ in an East London warehouse is, then, something to cherish even more than ever. Of course, we’re all socially-distanced, seated around tables over two levels inside the cavernous venue, but it’s still the closest thing to a club I’ve been inside since early 2020. The soundsystem is meaty enough, mostly overcoming the intensity void that’s inevitable under the circumstances, and as Jordan steps into the booth to take over from a barnstorming set by NTS regular OK Williams, they’re greeted with rapturous cheers and applause.

There’s a real warmth to Jordan’s music and public profile, and it’s tangible tonight – they play as if to a group of friends rather than a faceless mass of revellers, which helps plug the gaps in the crowd with some kind of surrogate intimacy. As anyone who’s heard Jordan’s past couple of EPs can attest, the hits come thick and fast, and so they do tonight, ‘I’m Waiting ( Just 4 You)’ from last year’s For You a particularly glorious highlight. It’s also the point at which a flustered bouncer has to exasperatedly demand we all sit back down, social distancing beginning to crack under the pressure of a great DJ set. Just imagine how it’ll feel to be able to shatter those restrictions entirely, in good conscience and exhilarated spirits. Luke Cartledge

It’s so obvious at this point that it barely needs saying, but what an odd time this has been for a producer like India Jordan to break through. The stuff they make really isn’t the kind of dance music that’s partially designed to be listened to at home on headphones, isolated from the sweaty, pheromonal clamour of the dancefloor (although that’s not to say it doesn’t sound good in that situation).

This sound – a neon-lit combination of Chicago-style house, ravey breakbeats, 2-steppy vocal flourishes and mischievous techno – is supposed to be experienced at physical volume, in physical proximity to

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FilmAlbums and Books Shivas, although as Danielle gets more and more foggy, and less and less polite, her confidence heads south and her desperation to assert her sexual self increases with a rising score of troubling violins and agressively plucked nylon strings.

When the Shiva ends, Seligman’s lightning script makes it feel like a heartbeat. Danielle is exhausted. Stuart Stubbs Shiva Baby (dir. emma seligman) Danielle has just finished fucking some guy when she has to rush to a day-long Shiva – a Jewish gathering of friends and family during a time of mourning. The guy pays her and she meets her mother and father outside the family home where she’ll endure the next six hours or so, being poked and prodded by older female relatives, quizzed about her future (she’s about to graduate from college and clearly has no idea what to do next) and asked about men (she’s bi-sexual).

Starting life as a short made at NYU, it’s easy to see why writer-director Emma Seligman built Shiva Baby out into her debut feature. Beyond her gleeful knack for depicting the over-fussing of neurotic parents (played brilliantly by Polly Draper and Fred Melamed), which could have fuelled the movie for untold more hours alone, she knows this world extremely well. Shiva Baby is largely drawn from personal experience – Seligman previously a young Jewish student who tried to have a sugar daddy in college herself, who attended Shiva’s where clear generational divides amused and drove her insane, where her queerness was amplified at a time when “the false ‘sexual power’ I’d discovered earlier in college was burning out and unearthing an incredibly low self-esteem.”

This all makes for perfect dark comedy and something a little more tense. Danielle (the brilliant Rachel Sennott) needs to blag her way through the day, dodging one embarrassing obstacle after the next. (Not in a Larry David way – Shiva Baby is awkward but kinder on the viewer than that.)

She doesn’t know who died, but that’s minor. Her ex-girlfriend from high school is there, who she’s still clearly into. And then her sugar daddy turns up. With his wife and baby. Who she didn’t know about.

Fortunately, there’s plenty of drink at

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Why Solange Matters — Stephanie Phillips (faber and faber) Not all of us saw A Seat At The Table coming, but when it arrived, one thing was clear: they don’t often make ’em like Solange. A pioneer of radical softness, her featherlight vocals and wide-ranging aesthetics have become an emblem upon which dreams can be projected, where recognition can be found. The sentiments Solange puts in song – “Don’t touch my hair”, “You have a right to be mad” – have been said elsewhere, but in her voice they become quietly revolutionary; a way for black fans to feel part of a cultural event.

With a heavy focus on that seismic record, Stephanie Phillips uses Why Solange Matters to expertly track the artist’s journey to international impact, from the backup-dancing days alongside her sister to Black-cowboy cinema of 2019’s When I Get Home. But the book also has an important parallel thread; the tendency to pigeonhole Black artists as R&B, even when their tastes and range vastly outstrip the category.

Given Phillips’ obvious personal investment, the book really sparkles in its emotional poignancy. Positioning Solange as a ‘weirdo black girl’, she acknowledges and celebrates her hero’s artistic bricolage, weaving anecdotes of her own life as a DIY punk musician to effectively demonstrate her knowledge and interest

without ever claiming singular authority. Solange is for us, by us, and there are numerous ways to read the table. Phillips knows this, and her excerpts from other fans feel inclusive and well-chosen, intermingling with her own. Her first experience of seeing Solange at Lovebox festvial is viscerally described (“In my mind, she could see me. In my mind, I touched her”), as is the experience of Phillips’ father coming alone from Jamaica to the UK as a ‘barrel child’, disorientated by the grey of Wolverhampton before finding love within his new home. Both tie perfectly back to the importance of visibility and recognition and Black joy, pivotal themes to the music of the artist at hand.

It’s also a book that opens some important questions, ones that feel hugely relevant for our current time. What does it mean to share trauma as a Black artist?

How can talking therapy help to interrupt the cycles of sibling rivalry? Where is home? Is it a geographical place, or the feeling of knowing that you’ve found a community and a record in which you can be your truest self? Through the book, it is posited that A Seat At The Table is more than an album – it is a moment of radical re-imagination, a resistance of racialised boundaries. For any of us who have listened to ‘Cranes In The Sky’ or ‘Don’t You Wait’ with painful self-recognition, it’s hard to disagree.

With an academic focus but accessible language, Why Solange Matters does what all great music books should do – it makes you want to run to that artist’s discography and fall in love all over again, renewed with the rush of appreciation that wider context and refreshed importance brings. As Phillips herself prophesies in the opening chapter, Solange has plenty more to give; there will likely be a great many more books about her work and its growing legacy. But as an opening salvo, this book more than celebrates the impressive cornucopia spread, inviting the reader to feast with both respect and awe. Whether you love Solange or simply want to visualise a more inclusive music industry for all, this book is an essential insight into a very special world.

Jenessa Williams

BILLY NOMATES CAROLINE FALLE NIOKE FAMOUS FLOHIO FOLLY GROUP GAIKA DJ SET GROVE GIRL RAY AFTERNOON SET KAI KWASI KEYAH/BLU MARTHA SKYE MURPHY NINE8 COLLECTIVE PORIJ PORRIDGE RADIO WU-LU YARD ACT & MORE visionsfestival.com THE OVAL

HACKNEY

LONDON

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higher

power

With a highly-acclaimed back catalogue, major acting roles and increasing icon status, Little Simz has nothing left to prove. With her new album, though, she is about to transcend even her own sky-high standards, by Gemma Samways Photography by Gem Harris

Little Simz is a lot taller than you might expect. Statuesque, and exuding an aura of quiet serenity, the 27-yearold proves a photographer’s dream today, malleable enough to take direction and yet secure enough in her own skin that she needs no instruction to bring out the best in each pose.

Turning that magnetism on and off as required, she saunters around the small east London studio to the strains of Jay-Z, an oasis of calm amidst an array of ramshackle props and artfully mismatched furniture.

From the outside looking in, Simz’s life can seem a strange tangle of contradictions. With co-signs from Kendrick, André 3000 and Lauryn Hill, the north London rapper is unquestionably one of the most respected players in UK hip hop, and yet is still operating way outside the skyscraping budgets of the major labels. She’s a successful actor with two major limited series to her name, and yet is anonymous and approachable enough for a passer-by today to stop her in the street and ask if she’s single. She’s deemed so important by the fashion industry that Gucci send a tailor across town to fit her forthcoming TV appearance on Later… with Jools Holland, but is down to earth enough to conduct said fitting in the middle of the studio’s foyer, surrounded by random detritus.

Back in grey sweats and a black Nike puffer after wrapping up the shoot, Simz hugs her hair and make-up team goodbye, and checks in with her driver to make sure he’s managed to eat a proper lunch. A banana and bottle of water in hand for hers, she strolls up the road for our interview.

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“Grey Area made people say, ‘Oh she’s arrived.’

But I still think people are like, ‘Yeah, it’s cool but can she do it again?’”

“It’s mad, mad, mad,” she says of her schedule, stretching out across the tiny, two-seater sofa in L&Q HQ. There’s an entire afternoon and evening of Zoom calls stretching out ahead of her to plan the US launch of her fourth album, Sometimes I Might Be Introvert, promo for which is set to take up much of the year. Somewhere amongst all this, Simz will find time to continue filming The Power, the Amazon adaptation of Naomi Alderman’s bestselling sci-fi novel in which she stars alongside Leslie Mann and John Leguizamo.

It’s all a far cry from her roots. Born Simbiatu Ajikawo – known as Simbi to her friends – she grew up in nearby Highbury, the youngest of four siblings raised by a single mother.

A regular at St. Mary’s Youth Club in Islington, she got into acting at a young age, winning roles in CBBC series Spirit Warriors and, later, E4’s Youngers. It was money earned from the former that first enabled her to invest in a budget mic and start honing her skills as an MC. — More than this —

Hip hop was a constant throughout Simz’s childhood. Drawn to rap via her interest in street dance and the record collection of her older brother, she remembers obsessing over the story-led approach of stars like Nas, Kanye, Lauryn Hill and The Notorious B.I.G., as well as the low key grooves of Mos Def and Slum Village. Encouraged by close friends Josh Arcé, Chuck20, and Tilla – with whom she formed the rap collective Space Age – she put out her first mixtape at 15. She went on to share a further three tapes plus five EPs before the release of her debut album, A Curious Tale of Trials + Persons, in October 2015.

Today Simz lays the credit for her staggering drive squarely at her upbringing. “It was me looking at the environment around me and being like, no way this is it. Like, this can’t be it; I know there’s more out there. And obviously my mum’s raised me as a single parent, so just seeing how hard she works and how all-out she goes for her family, I think that’s just trickled down to me. I just want to work hard and do my best. Because growing up where I grew up, you don’t just

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get things given to you: you have to really go and work for it.

“I think I had those teachings from early. And seeing people in my area die, get murdered, go to jail, all this stuff…

I’m not a gang member or anything – I was never that person – but I knew people like that. Growing up in that area I’d seen how easy it is to get sucked in and feel like, well, there’s nothing else to do, so I might as well just do that. Yeah, I had a rude awakening.”

It’s an experience she explores on ‘Little Q Part 2’ from Sometimes I Might Be Introvert. Over breezy beats and Jackson 5-inspired harmonies, Simz spits about life on the streets and the wider ramifications on boys and young men in lines like, “PTSD from the roads / Trouble was everywhere that I looked,” and, “You’re dealt the same cards from the system you’re enslaved in, it’s fucking mayhem.” The song is entirely based on the experiences of her cousin.

“He’s three years younger than me,” she explains. “We grew up together but he lived in south London and I lived north, and there was a time where we stopped talking. But then we regained contact and we just started having some deep heart-to-hearts. There was a big chunk of his life that I missed out on, and he was filling me in on this story and I was thinking, ‘Wow, what? You almost died?’ He was stabbed in the chest. He was in a coma. My mind was just blown.

“Obviously, it’s his story and it’s unique, but these types of things happen every day, to young Black boys especially.

And thank God he’s still got his life because if he had lost his life he’d just have been a statistic; another Black boy that lost his life in London, and who never got to tell their story. So I think as much as my album is about me, it’s also an opportunity for me to shed light on other people’s stories and give them that platform.”

In a year where it feels like systemic racism and structural inequality is finally being more widely scrutinised, Simz’s decision to tell this story now feels particularly prescient.

However, she’s reluctant to be drawn too deeply on how inspired S.I.M.B.I. was by the wider political context, which included the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and subsequent protests staged by the Black Lives Matter move-

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ment. As she puts it on lead single ‘Introvert’, “I study humans that makes me an anthropologist / I’m not into politics.”

“When all of that stuff was going on I wasn’t really on social media,” she says, choosing her words carefully. “I needed to take a step back, because I’m someone that feels things very intensely. I take on a lot and when everyone is trauma-bonding and coming with all their pain and hurt into one area, it’s just a bit overwhelming for me. And I just needed to take time to work out how I actually feel, because not all Black people feel the same, or think the same.”

This atmosphere of turmoil is palpable on the aforementioned ‘Introvert’. Finding Simz grappling with her personal and professional responsibilities, it’s a treatise on personal identity as much as it is a clarion call decrying societal injustice. “Simz the artist, or Simbi the person?” she sighs, confiding, “If I don’t take this winner’s flight that’s career suicide / Though I should’ve been a friend when your grandma died.”

— An album for everywhere —

Balancing career commitments with her responsibilities to family and friends is something Simz has always struggled with, but never more so than after the arrival of Grey Area.

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Released in early 2019, her third album proved a breakthrough moment, finding acclaim far beyond the rap community, and winning Simz a Mercury Prize nomination as well as an Ivor Novello award for Best Album. Combine this with the fact she was simultaneously promoting series three of Top Boy – the Netflix drama in which she plays single mum Shelley, acting opposite Kano, Ashley Walters and Dave – Simz found herself being pulled in several directions at once.

“There’s definitely been moments of feeling like I’ve not had my priorities in check,” she nods. “Because I’m so ambitious and driven, and have never taken my eye off the prize, it’s caused me to miss out on certain moments. But I’ve learned what are the really important things to me. It’s like, when I miss a birthday party because of work, in five years I won’t even remember what the job was but I will remember I missed that birthday. So it’s just about paying attention to those things and trying to be present. So now, as hard as I’m working, I’m just working a lot smarter.”

As for whether Simz saw Grey Area as a breakthrough, well, the jury’s still out. Speaking to the Hip Hop Saved My Life podcast back in 2019, she described it as “the album everyone had been waiting for me to make.” Though hugely proud of the record still, today she’s less celebratory about it.

“There’s this misconception that there can only be one woman at the top. Why don’t we just start here and change the narrative?”

“I think it made people say, ‘Oh she’s arrived.’ But I still think people are like, ‘Yeah, it’s cool but can she do it again?’

Not that I felt pressure with [S.I.M.B.I.], but I knew it was gonna be like, ‘Was Grey Area a fluke? Did she just get lucky with that one?’ So as much as it did feel like a breakthrough, it kind of didn’t. I still felt like I needed to prove myself, you know? And at the time it was probably [about proving myself] to other people, but I think in making this album it’s been about proving that to myself.”

There’s no question that S.I.M.B.I. represents another giant leap forward. Begun pre-lockdown in L.A. and finished between September and December of 2020 – at the same time as filming series 4 of Top Boy – it was recorded with her childhood friend Inflo, who also produced Grey Area as well

as both of last year’s acclaimed SAULT records. Stylistically, it finds Simz operating on another plane entirely, delivering some of the most impactful bars of her career and a dazzling array of different musical styles.

Backed by a 40-piece orchestra and recorded at Abbey Road, ‘Introvert’ emulates the epicness of Jay-Z-classic The Black Album, while second single ‘Woman’ draws on the warmth of ’70s soul. There’s the cosmic, ’80s funk feel of ‘Protect My Energy’ – influenced by Nigerian singer Steve Monite – and the Afrobeat-inspired Obongjayar collaboration ‘Point and Kill’. ‘Rollin Stone’ finds Simz spitting blistering, grime-inspired bars, before the song climaxes in a haze of pitch-shifted vocals and woozy trap beats. Meanwhile ‘Two Worlds Apart’ repurposes the refrain from ‘The Agony

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and The Ecstasy’ by Smokey Robinson, which – impressively – is the record’s only sample.

“That was the goal,” Simz says of the record’s vast variety. “It was about trying to make it exist everywhere. Like, you might walk into a restaurant in Nigeria and hear ‘Point and Kill’, and then you might be in Sweden at some low key disco and hear ‘Protect My Energy’. And that’s probably inspired by my live shows. I’ll look out into the audience and see kids on my left that are no older than 18 going crazy and moshing, and then I look to my right and I see a couple that are definitely in their ’60s. I love that different generations can co-exist at my shows and enjoy this music, and I want to continue to cater to that. And also I enjoy different types of music.

“I probably won’t make another album like this again and that’s cool, because I can’t do the same thing twice and expect different results. So I’m just tryna push the envelope as much as possible. I want to keep proving to myself that I’m not confined to this box of rap/hip hop/urban whatever.

There are different sides to me and I’m just exploring them.”

— The rapper that came to tea —

This idea of self-discovery bleeds into the lyrics, which – as the title implies – finds Simz squaring her successes with her status as an introvert. It’s a theme she addressed on ‘Therapy’ from Grey Area, but on S.I.M.B.I. she drills much deeper, frequently providing further exposition via spoken world interludes voiced by Emma Corrin, who plays Princess Diana in The Crown.

At the end of ‘Introvert’, Corrin consoles in cut-glass tones, explaining, “Your introversion led you here / Intuition protected you along the way / Feelings allowed you to be well balanced / And perspective gave you foresight.” By ‘The Rapper That Came To Tea’ that supportiveness has been flipped on its head, with Corrin condescendingly sneering, “The extroverts like to be entertained and I was told you don’t talk much.” As Simz explains, it was the success of Grey Area that forced her to confront her introversion.

“I’ve always been a quiet kid and then all of a sudden it was all red carpets and people saying, ‘Congratulations’ on this, and, ‘Let’s go out to drinks’. And it was a lot. Because you’re in the public eye or in front of the camera, you’re expected to have this extroverted persona, but actually that’s not me in my day-to-day life. So I just wanted to turn inwards a lot more and speak about things that would probably put me in a more vulnerable space.”

Certainly, S.I.M.B.I. features two of her most candid songs yet. ‘I See You’ finds her confessing her insecurities to – and professing her affection for – an unnamed lover, with lines like, “Whisper in my ear and tell me you won’t leave.”

Simz refuses to be drawn on the inspiration for the song today, responding to enquiries about her love life with an elusive, “I value mystery.”

On ‘I Love You, I Hate You’, she’s more transparent, tackling her strained relationship with her father over a Ray Charles-inspired vocal riff sung by Inflo. “My ego won’t

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fully allow me to say that I miss you / A woman who hasn’t confronted all her daddy issues,” she confesses at one point, her hurt later turning to anger in the accusation, “Is you a sperm donor or a dad to me?”

By contrast, the self-directed video for ‘Woman’ finds Simz saluting loyalty, with cameos from her inner circle, a cast of day ones that extends from supermodel Jourdan Dunn and musician Denai Moore to SImz’s best friend from primary school and two of her cousins. As she explains, the video concept further reinforces the positive messaging of the song, which was written with the intention of encouraging women to uplift one another rather than behave like rivals.

“There’s this misconception that there can only be one woman at the top: one doing great, one excelling. It’s like, why don’t we just start here and change the narrative?

Because we definitely don’t have to wait for other people to green-light it. There’s more than enough space for everyone to exist within their own space. Everyone’s doing their thing and that’s great – we should be celebrating that.”

I wonder if Simz’s introversion ever results in her being underestimated. “Yeah,” she smiles. “But I love it. It just gives me more fire in my belly, to be honest. Just because I’m introverted, it doesn’t mean I can’t express myself. Just because I’m quiet it doesn’t mean I’m not confident, or am unsure of myself. I’m very confident and I know myself, but I’m just not always the loudest in the room. When it comes to doing what I love, I go all out for it.”

It’s a sentiment backed up by her recent tweet: “No more slept on talk, no more underrated talk, pls & thank you.” When asked about it today, Simz rolls her eyes. “It’s just a bit played out,” she sighs. “It’s like, if you like it then how is it underrated? If you rate it then it’s rated, right? Don’t be like follow, follow – change the narrative.” And yet there is a sense that Simz has been undervalued up until now, and that S.I.M.B.I. could be the record to change all that for good.

Does she feel like she’s levelled up?

“Yeah. But that’s the only way it was gonna go. Especially after Grey Area. Leaving that where we left it, it was only gonna go this way. I knew people were gonna be all over it in terms of dissecting and critiquing everything, so I was like I’m not gonna give anyone reason to deny this. I was just really set on pushing my pen and taking my writing to another level, and just outdoing myself.”

She shrugs. “I’m just really trying to make great, classic albums. Records that I’m going to want to play to my grandkids, alongside Nina Simone and John Coltrane and Michael Jackson. And as long as I’m fit and healthy and my mind is in a good space and I’m inspired that’s what I wanna continue to do.

“I know I’m special and I’m powerful. And I don’t mean that in an arrogant way; but it’s just my truth. I know I have a lot to contribute and to offer and I’m not naive enough to think that this is all my doing. I believe in a higher power and that I’m being used as a vessel, so I’m just allowing the powers that be to guide me. And then in the same breath, to be rooted in family and friends. Because those things are just as important to me as music, if not more so.”

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After the freeze Speaking to a host of independent voices from across the UK, Dominic Haley asks what’s next for Britain’s DIY music scene after the pandemic

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Matt Baty lets out a long sigh when I ask him about his 2020.

“I’m not going to lie; it’s been stressful at points. We’ve pretty much had to freeze everything.”

Until the pandemic hit, Baty’s band Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs [opposite] was all set for a breakthrough year.

Their third album, Viscerals, was getting significant airplay, and they were all set to head to the States for shows at SXSW and a short tour. Instead, they found themselves forced to kick their heels. “Our guitarist has cystic fibrosis, so he’s had to shield the entire time, he’s literally been unable to leave his house in 12 months, and as you’d imagine, it’s been pretty difficult to do anything without him. Our band only really works when we can all get together, and you can count the number of times we’ve managed that on one hand. Suffice to say, we didn’t get a lot done.”

By no means typical, Baty and Pigs’ experience is a pretty good illustration of the corrosive effect COVID-19 has had on Britain’s grassroots music scene. It’s stating the obvious that music is a collaborative effort, and the virus has attacked the connections between communities just as relentlessly as it’s attacked airways. Across the country, musicians have had to overcome significant barriers, from finding new ways to work together to reaching out to fans and making money. However, while the disease has affected everyone, it certainly hasn’t affected everyone equally.

“It’s definitely been a journey,” Sinead Mills of Hoof Management tells me as she runs through her experiences of the pandemic. Looking after artists like Squid, William Doyle and Lazarus Kane, Mills and her fellow managers Tash Cutts and Ina Tatarko have had an equally fraught year, but somehow managed to keep productive.

“The uncertainty has been tough, especially seeing tours and recording sessions wiped from the calendar over and over again; however, everyone has adapted incredibly well. There’s been a lot of music and ideas shared digitally and a hell of a lot of Zooms.” In the main, Hoof ’s story of the pandemic has been a model of DIY resilience. Squid, for example, wouldn’t have been able to release their debut album Bright Green Field without the generosity of the local community – local Chippenham pub The Old Road Tavern allowed the band to create a bubble and use the bar to write and rehearse new material [below].

“Other artists like William Doyle released an album that he salvaged from a hard-drive crash,” Mills adds, highlighting how Hoof ’s other artists had kept active during the pandemic. “He probably would’ve just ignored it if he’d been on tour or in the studio working on a different LP.” The pandemic might’ve hampered the ability to make music, but the DIY ethos has allowed many acts to power through. Artists have leapt logistical problems with not much more than a can-do attitude. Practices have been replaced by Zoom sessions, songwriting has been conducted over WhatsApp, live gigs streamed over Instagram and records sold through Bandcamp. Emotionally though, it’s been a different story. A year of forced isolation and endless uncertainty has taken a toll on many of the artists I spoke to. A lot reported that they felt split off from the support network and feedback loops that often sustains music scenes. According to a study from the charity Help Musicians, nine in ten artists have struggled with mental health issues over the past 12 months.

“I’ve found it really hard to be creative,” Trish Khallagi tells me over a Zoom call. DJing under the moniker of K Means [above], a name taken from her day job as a software developer, before the virus hit she was building a steady reputation in the darker and weirder regions of electronica through shows across Southern England and a regular show on Bristol’s Noods Radio. “I’ve always felt like I was halfway between an extrovert and an introvert, but the last year has shown me how much my creativity stems from other people. As a result, my motivation has really suffered. I’ve tried to do as much as I can, but I’ve also ended up postponing a lot of things.

I’ve struggled to do things at the frequency that I’d normally do things.”

MUSIC WITHOUT FANS

Even before the COVID hit, eulogies have been whispered over the coffin of DIY. As far back as I can remember, op-ed after op-ed has been lamenting the slow collapse of the ecosystem that makes underground music possible. First, gentrification made it harder for budding musicians to find affordable practice spaces or places to perform. Next came a remodelling of

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what had been a supportive music press – the demise of traditional advertising and the rise of pay-per-click resulting in more coverage of established artists and less support for new music. The final blow had been streaming. What was promised to be a democratisation of music has become a doubleedged sword. On the one hand, streaming makes it easier for fans to discover new artists. On the other hand, the unfair payment structures and closed-shop business practices have led to many small artists and labels receiving only a pittance for their work.

The thing is, though, while all of the above is true, it’s only ever been part of the story. Time after time, the DIY music industry has found a way to survive and thrive even as the rug felt like it was being constantly pulled from under it.

Take South London, for example. In an area that’s often been held up as a case study for rampant gentrification and diminishing numbers of art spaces, a scene of bands has coalesced

around the Windmill pub and venue in Brixton, producing the likes of Black Midi, Squid, Black Country New Road and Goat Girl in a few short years. Just behind them, PVA [above] were poised to follow. I interviewed them at a stylish Deptford art cafe back in the late summer of 2019 and was immediately taken aback by their willingness to re-engineer the established dogmas of DIY music. At the time, the band managed to pack out venues on the back of only half a song’s worth of recorded music. Instead, the band was using a combination of social media, word of mouth and a well-honed live show to grow a large following of devoted fans who were creating a real feeling of buzz around the band.

With COVID splitting musicians from their fans, I caught up with PVA to see how they’d adapted. “We’ve always been a band that relies on live events to reach our audience, so the transition from a stage to our bedrooms has been an interesting one,” says frontperson Ella Harris. “Playing live has always been such a crucial part of the process; we’ve always found it hard to realise a song until we’ve played it at a

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party or a gig. Then again, being apart during the first lockdown allowed us to explore our own approaches to music.”

Going even further, a few artists have navigated the difficulties of last year seemingly without breaking a sweat.

“My career’s taken off during the pandemic,” Birminghambased rapper M1llionz [above] tells me from the studio he’s using to make the finishing touches to his record. “I’m really not all that accustomed to live performance. Don’t get me wrong, the lack of face to face interaction with my fans has been tough; I’m definitely looking forward to performing, especially as my fellow artists have told me it’s one of the most enjoyable parts of the job.”

Part of the Midlands’ fast-rising drill scene, the pandemic has only really been a speed bump for M1llionz.

The ongoing criminalisation of drill had effectively taken live performances off the table for many up-and-coming rappers, meaning that many had turned to technology to reach their fans even before lockdowns and venue closures.

“Live streaming has been a saving grace through all this,” he continues when I ask him about his experience building a rep over YouTube and Instagram. “Social media has been really important because it builds up attraction around a release.

It’s great for promotion – my fans get to know me better, and they can see what I get up to.”

Similarly, down on the south coast of England, I found another group using technology to redevelop the link between artist and fan. Richard Phoenix has been involved with DIY music since becoming a member of Sauna Youth; he now works with musicians with learning difficulties and autism.

“I have to say, my experiences of the last year have been remarkably positive for the most part,” he recalls from his home in Hastings. “It’s opened up a whole new way of thinking about music, from finding ways to collaborate to bringing artists and audiences together through virtual gigs and live streams.”

“In a lot of ways, I feel like the pandemic has opened music up to a lot of people. Using tools like Chrome Music Lab, we’ve been able to organise things that would’ve been an absolute nightmare in real life. If you wanted to find 20 people to jam on one track, in the past you’d need to find a space, loads of equipment and solve the access problems that

come with that. With the internet, though, it’s all relatively straightforward. It’s allowed people to be involved with music in ways that they’ve never been able to do before, from interactive shows to collaborative sessions. It’s really breaking down the performer/crowd dynamic and is actually helping to open up the experience to everyone.”

DORMANT OR DEAD?

Social media, live streams and WhatsApp jam sessions might have kept the lights on for many acts and fans, but now that infection rates are falling and venues are opening up, Britain is poised to get back out there. Industry body LIVE recently surveyed 25,000 music fans and have found that demand for live shows has never been higher. Over 75% of fans are either ready to hit a club right now or are happy with only the smallest amount of mitigation measures in place. There’s also a yearning for everything to go back to how it was, with 53% saying that they’d attend gigs with no extra hygiene consideration. In fact, the study found that masks and social distancing were the most likely factors in deterring fans from attending, especially among the youngest age group.

“Honestly, come July, it’s on,” beams Anthony Chalmers, who’s feeling bullish about the months ahead. As well as being one half of the well-respected Independent Music Podcast, he’s the driving force behind Baba Yaga’s Hut, known for experimental nights at Corsica Studios in London and the annual Raw Power Festival. Needless to say, he’s been unusually quiet last year, although the few gigs he did manage to put on hints at the demand bubbling beneath the surface. “I did four shows last year, and while they definitely weren’t the best ones that I’ve ever done, I have to say that everyone went pretty wild.

I remember chatting with the booker at the Strongroom after one of them and figuring out that the bar take must’ve been like £30 to £35 per head. I mean, if that doesn’t say that people are excited to be back out there, I don’t know what does.”

It’s a sentiment that’s echoed by Alexander Smail, who runs Edinburgh-based zine Cocoon. “In Scotland at least, I’m cautiously optimistic about the near future. I think there’s a feeling that the whole thing is dormant rather than dead.”

Cocoon is Smail’s DIY response to COVID. Born out of the frustration brought on by the never-changing days of lockdown, this zine project is a tribute to the escapist power of music; a collection of essays exploring the connections between music and memory, from retreats into hidden gems, rediscovered desire and memories of old vacations. As well as

“You’ve basically had a whole year where the only way to discover music has been through social media” bringing a community of music fans together, the sales have helped organisations working with marginalised groups, such We Belong, a charity created for and by young UK immigrants, Scottish Women’s Aid and The Black Curriculum.

Smail, readily admitting that he hasn’t listened to much new music over the past year, sounds a note of caution.

“While I’m excited to get back out there, I can’t help but think that the virus has made it more difficult for new bands to get a foothold. You’ve basically had a whole year where the only way to discover music has been through social media, and while that’s helped artists survive, I think it’s made grassroots music a lot more cliquey. Even things like Patreon and Bandcamp tend to end up becoming a bit exclusionary. You’re kind of forced to pay for access, and while that’s good as it allows these acts to continue, it does make it harder to just stumble onto a band like it once was. If anything, it makes the role of the press and radio even more important.”

Looking at the numbers, it’s hard to disagree. The pandemic has undoubtedly been tough for the UK’s grassroots music scene, but as each week passes, it’s starting to feel like the problems that are coming with Brexit might be a whole other shit sandwich. A new survey by the Incorporated Society of Musicians and the Musicians’ Union has revealed that exiting the European Union is shaping up to be a hammer blow. Customs changes are due to slap at least £15,000 of additional expenses to acts wanting to tour or sell their music on the continent while significantly reducing musicians’ ability to earn. The survey found that 77% of musicians surveyed expect their margins to decrease, with 21% considering quitting altogether.

Unsurprisingly, it’s leaving people with mixed prospects at best. “It’s more difficult than ever to find the resources to survive as a purely DIY artist,” explains Tash from Hoof Management when I ask her about the viability of the DIY model in the new normal. “Without live music, there have been fewer opportunities for bands to make the industry

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connections that are often required to help a project reach the next level, and labels may now be less inclined to take risks on new artists. So, even though the DIY model has itself been impacted by the pandemic, it will have to become the predominant method for artists whilst the industry recovers.”

that in so many ways it’s a total fallacy. Whether it’s places to practice or places to congregate, you’re always surrounded by some level of support, whether you know it or not. Hopefully, with the pandemic, a lot of people will have realised that ‘Do It Yourself ’ is actually contingent on a lot of other things and hopefully be more aware of what they are.”

BUILDING UP AND BUILDING OUT

All in all, it’s been a year of self-reflection, experimentation and innovation, and for the music industry the only thing coming down the pipe is more uncertainty. The pace of evolution has always been fastest down at the DIY level of making music. With big challenges on the horizon, it’s more than likely that the definition of independent music will be changing again. The question now is what should it look like?

“Now’s the right time to pause and think about how we can do things better,” nods Khallagi when I ask her about the direction electronic music needs to take now that the worst seems to be over. “I’d like to see this as a point where we can start doing things differently, such as booking acts that are more local and ensuring that line ups are more diverse, but I do worry that we’ll end up slipping back pretty quickly. DIY spaces are the places that have suffered the most, and unfortunately I can see them falling back on what worked before.”

Unfortunately, the data suggests she might be right.

Back in March, the Guardian looked at 31 events planned for the summer of 2021 and found that the issue of gender equality has already fallen by the wayside, with festivals such as Isle of Wight, Latitude, Field Day and Neighborhood all

“Hopefully a lot of people will have realised that ‘Do It Yourself’ is actually contingent on a lot of other things” promoting lineups that are 60% male. A Musicians’ Union study back in September, meanwhile, showed that women, gender minorities and people of colour disproportionately affected by the pandemic are calling on industry leaders to commit to better representation.

“There does tend to be a bit of an outdated view on what is and isn’t ‘DIY’,” says Smail when I ask him about the future. “We really do need to change the way we talk about it – it tends to be depicted as this gritty, edgy, punky scene full of white guys with guitars, but DIY isn’t ever just one thing.

It really should be a space where people can be anything that they want it to be.”

When I put the same question to Phoenix, he pushes me to go even further. “I think we should unpick this idea of what ‘DIY’ actually means. There’s a romantic notion of selfreliance, but when you actually take the time to look into this idea that you can do it all on your own, you quickly realise

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Phoenix has recently published a DIY as Privilege on Rough Trade, a 13-point manifesto detailing how underground music can be more accessible to people who have usually been shut out. He defines DIY as an ‘idea that anyone is capable of becoming a musician and sharing their music.

It empowers individuals and communities, encouraging alternative approaches when faced with obstacles.’ It recognises that underground music is a place where resources are scarce and asks that artists, fans, creators and supporters work to recognise their advantages and ensure a scene that is fair for everyone.

“The big thing gatekeepers need to consider is this idea of permission,” he explains. “As a teenager, I thought it was perfectly reasonable for me to play in a band as all I saw was people who looked like me playing in bands. But obviously, that’s not what everyone sees on stage, or even in their lives, so anything that can give people permission and let them feel like they’re allowed to take ownership, make music and put their ideas out there is really important. We should always be asking who gives us permission to be on that stage and how we extend that permission to other people.”

LOUD AND QUIET - ALBUM OF THE MONTH - 9/10

Final Third: Cold Take

Digging in a hole U2’s great digital fly-tip of 2014, by Andrew Anderson

Your alarm goes off. It’s the second one of the morning, and this one you can’t ignore. 7:30am, time to get up.

You open your phone and try to focus on the screen. Check your emails, nothing interesting. Not much happening in the news either, just stuff about the Scottish independence referendum. You pull up iTunes – maybe music will help.

Wait, what? You look again. There must be some kind of mistake. But there isn’t...

What the fuck is this U2 album doing on my phone?!

This was the scenario taking place in millions of bedrooms on the morning of 10 September, 2014. Because it was on this day* that U2’s album Songs of Innocence was automatically added to 500 million iPhones, triggering one of the biggest controversies – and one of the worst apologies – in modern music history.

“People who haven’t heard our music, or weren’t remotely interested, might play us for the first time because we’re in their library.” – Bono There had been rumblings that something was going to happen. U2 hadn’t released an album since 2009, the longest break of their career. On message boards there was speculation that they’d play at the Apple iPhone 6 Launch in September.

Both Apple and U2 denied the reports, but there was precedent – back in 2004 Apple had done a limited-edition iPod with U2’s entire back catalogue pre-loaded onto it.

Apple CEO Tim Cook went through the first hour of his presentation. Cook had taken over from Steve Jobs in 2011, and had kept the informal product launch format that had helped

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make his predecessor an icon. But while Jobs always seemed like a rock star at these events, Cook was more like an out-of-touch geography professor trying to teach a Year 9 sex education class.

He smiled awkwardly as he unveiled first the iPhone 6, then the original Apple Watch.

AND THEN THE MOMENT Cook welcomed U2 onto the Cupertino stage and said they’d be performing their new single – a world exclusive. The crowd of Apple employees, journalists and tech junkies cheered. U2 ran through ‘The Miracle (Of Joey Ramone)’. It was a bit flat, but corporate gigs usually are.

Bono and Cook embraced, and followed that with some awkward dialogue about how U2 and Apple both love to make great products, and wouldn’t it be amazing if everyone in the world could receive U2’s new album all at the same time? Well it turned out they could, and at that moment Songs of Innocence was added to hundreds of millions of music libraries across the world.

For Apple, the idea was that this publicity stunt would bring in millions of new iTunes subscribers who wanted to hear the album for free. Further, some of U2’s rock and roll glamour would rub off on them.

For U2, it was a no-brainer. Their album was effectively being sold to 500 million people, and they’d get a ton of press coverage. Further, Apple were prepared to pay them around $52m (the most commonly estimated amount linked to the deal)

Final Third: Cold Take for exclusive rights to the album for five weeks.

“Every iTunes customer gets this album, this incredible album for free. That’s over a half a billion customers and it makes music history because it’s the largest album release of all time.” – Tim Cook AND THEN THE BACKLASH Both Apple and U2 were immediately criticized over the release.

The reaction on social media was predictably hostile, and an aggregate of those messages might read something like, “I didn’t think I could hate U2 more, but Apple found a way.” Meanwhile, some musicians said that giving the album away for free devalued music, and made it less likely that people would pay to buy other albums.

Others didn’t really get what the fuss was about. Yes, Songs of Innocence had appeared on iPhones unannounced, but it wasn’t like it started playing automatically. In fact, the album didn’t even download itself unless you requested it. You didn’t have to listen to it if you didn’t want to, and you could always delete it from your iTunes if it bothered you that much.

Meanwhile, many millions of people were happy that they had a U2 album for free. In 2014 streaming wasn’t quite what it is now, and so many people were still buying albums from iTunes or elsewhere – usually for $9.99. For a lot of fans, the album giveaway was a generous gift.

“If you would like U2’s Songs of Innocence removed from your iTunes music library and iTunes purchases, you can choose to have it removed. Once the album has been removed from your account, it will no longer be available for you to redownload as a previous purchase.” – Apple AND THEN THE APOLOGY At first Apple thought the problem would just go away. But as more and more people discovered they had an unwanted album in their iTunes, the backlash grew and grew. Instead of people talking about the new iPhone and Apple Watch, people were talking about how annoyed they were. In the end, Apple had to issue special instructions on how to remove the album from its devices.

U2 had expected some people wouldn’t be happy about having the album foisted upon them – in the release statement, Bono had told people who didn’t want Songs of Innocence to think of it as “junk mail” – but the negative reaction was far bigger than they’d imagined. It was now over a month since it had dropped, and people were still pissed. The band would have to do something.

That something turned out to be one of the most lukewarm apologies of all time. In a video Q&A session on Facebook, Bono said “oops, sorry” and blamed it on a “drop of megalomania, [a] touch of generosity.” It didn’t help that he was wearing sunglasses that obscured his eyes, or that the rest of the band laughed while he spoke. As for the claim that U2 were devaluing music by giving

it away for free, the band addressed that separately. They got paid

by Apple, they explained, so the music wasn’t being given for free.

“I had this beautiful idea and we kind of got carried away with ourselves. Artists are prone to that kind of thing. Drop of megalomania, touch of generosity, dash of self-promotion and deep fear that these songs that we poured our life into over the last few years mightn’t be heard.” – Bono AND THEN NOTHING CHANGED What U2 had failed to understand is that even though music collections had become digital, they were (and are) still personal.

It might not be as satisfying having an album saved in your iTunes as it is having a physical copy on vinyl, but it still means something – it’s an expression of the self. Imagine coming home to find a book by an author you hated displayed prominently on your bookshelf, and you had no idea how it got there.

The band also cheapened their artistic voice by releasing it in this way. Music only has value when someone chooses to listen to it. Yes, 500 million people had the album, but not a single one of them chose to have it. For an album that they claimed was their “most personal ever” it wasn’t a very personal way of sharing it.

The irony of such a cynical release strategy being used on an album called Songs of Innocence was not lost on people.

Not that it really mattered, because the stunt actually worked very well for U2. In the following weeks, all of U2’s back catalogue appeared in the album charts at one time or another, so in addition to the millions they got from Apple, they got millions more in extra sales. The following Innocence + Experience Tour brought in $152m, with more than 1.29m people attending the concerts.

For Apple, too, the backlash was only temporary. Tying themselves to U2 helped to confirm that they weren’t the cool company they pretended to be under Steve Jobs, but given that Apple had reportedly kept its Chinese factory workers in slave-like conditions, violated its customers’ privacy on multiple occasions, and sent out updates that deliberately slow down machines so people would buy new ones, without affecting sales, it was unlikely that a single U2 album would change much – and it didn’t. Since that 2014 launch, Apple’s global sales have risen from $182bn to $274bn, a rise of about 50%.

In the end, Songs of Innocence didn’t change much. People that hated U2 still hated them; people that loved them still loved them. People still bought Apple products, and no one boycotted them. And even the idea of a mass album giveaway didn’t disrupt the industry, not because it was a failure, but because something else did: streaming. The move to streaming and subscription models means that artists simply don’t sell many digital copies anymore. It’s hard to get exact figures, but each year U2 earn around $2-3m from streaming, and that is growing all the time, without them having to record or release any new material, or even market themselves. I can listen to any U2 album I like, right now, if I choose to, just by opening my Spotify account.

I choose not to.

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Final Third: In Conversation

Furry logic

A long talk with Laura Marling and Mike Lindsay about the unexpected return of their collaborative project LUMP, by Tara Joshi. Photography by Tamsin Topolski

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Final Third: In Conversation Just days after meeting for the first time, Tunng’s Mike Lindsay and Laura Marling went to the studio and started recording their collaborative album, 2018’s LUMP. It had only ever been intended as a one-off project, but the exhilaration they found in touring that excellent, strange record led them back to the studio in 2019. Held up by the pandemic and focusing on their own projects last year (Tunng’s Dead Club and Marling’s Song For Our Daughter), when I meet them in a rehearsal space in East London they are finally preparing to get their second album, Animal, out into the world. It’s a listen that takes the twisted imagination of the first album and turns it up a notch, all phenomenal, fantasy joy and soaring, unsettling darkness – almost like something you might find on the soundtrack for a film like Labyrinth. Marling meets the engaging sonic adventure of Lindsay’s music with crisp vocals, speaking to life beguiling poetic lyrics. All together it feels quite magical and understandably they’re both ebullient in reunion, ready to return to the fascinating universe of LUMP. We speak about their creative process together, the year in pandemic, and the furry puppet creature that represents the duo.

TARA JOSHI: With this record, from what I’ve read about it, it wasn’t like you stayed in touch in a very in-depth way in between the two albums.

MIKE LINDSAY: What have we been saying!? It’s true, we haven’t been, you know, hanging out that much in between – it is more of a working relationship than a drinking one [laughs].

LAURA MARLING: By design, in a nice way! It’s not that we don’t like each other.

ML: We just don’t like talking [laughs]. But no, we have a method of working that we wanted to recreate on this new record.

Laura won’t hear anything until she comes to the studio, so there’s an immediate reaction, so we tried to recreate that again.

TJ: What makes a LUMP song?

ML: On the first record, I had no idea because it didn’t exist. It was just a set of textures that I was enjoying experimenting with – those breathy, wooden, organic textures mixed with ’70s electronic gubbins. So I wanted to keep that flavour in mind for the new record – it’s quite a different record, but there are properties that are the same. And I think because we invented the character of Lump, that helped me with the music and imagining a parallel universe. What would Lump be listening to while walking along his odd pathway? So I was thinking about things like that. Also with this record I had just moved to Margate and, a bit cheesily, I was taking lots of walks by the sea. I heard about waves coming in cycles of seven. And then I thought about waves and other things that are waves – like Gamma Ray is one of the titles of the tracks – and I was thinking about radio waves and things like that. So a lot of the tracks are in 7/4, which is really annoying for us now.

LM: Really annoying.

ML: Because we’ve got to learn how to play that properly.

It’s difficult timing. But it’s quite nice to have a set of ideas that you can play with.

TJ: You were speaking about the creature of Lump – how did Lump manifest?

LM: The name was from my goddaughter who was five at the time. So Lump, the way that she conceived of it, made it feel like it was a character rather than a band.

ML: Yeah, or even just the word ‘lump’, your description of the way she said ‘lump!’ – it felt like something childlike; but that word conjures up lots of other connotations...

LM: Yeah, don’t Google ‘lump’.

ML: It brings to mind negative bodily situations, but it was so innocent, Laura’s description of the way her goddaughter said it. But I don’t know when we decided Lump would be a creature.

LM: I think we thought it might be more appropriate to make something that represents the sum of our parts rather than both of us individually. Because the music came out so organically, and randomly, so it felt easier to shift it onto something else. That’s probably why.

TJ: It’s interesting that you talk about the dark connotations of the word lump. I feel like on both albums, there’s this unsettling undertone. Is there any degree of intention or discussion of how that happens?

ML: No, but I think that’s where the “greater than the sum of its parts” thing comes in.

Not having conversations, not being friends [laughs].

I think creating a world with darkness and pockets of joy and trying to seamlessly – or not so seamlessly – blend the music and the tracks into each other, creating a journey, it seems to be part of an unsaid thing that we’re trying to do with Lump.

LM: The lyrics are obviously a reaction to the music – in the chicken and egg scenario here music is coming first. And to my ears, it’s very detailed and textured so I’m responding to something quite clear in the music.

TJ: What does this project allow that you don’t already do in your own work?

ML: Well, it’s very different from my world with Tunng, because there’s six people in Tunng whereas I get to do what I want with Lump. Which I do with Tunng as well, but it’s just a way to explore new avenues and really dive into whatever you want to do and create a whole new persona, musically. Tunng have done seven albums, and there’s a flavour that we created and we work within that flavour. And it touches on things that are happening in Lump, but this is a lot freer for me.

LM: It’s the same for me really. I guess I have a lot of autonomy in my other persona, but it’s quite nice to have limitations and a limited role as well. Laura Marling as a persona began at 15 or 16, and this one began at 28, which is, you know, very different. This is a much more freeing experience. And it’s acting as well, it’s like a play or something.

ML: I like how you say, ‘Laura Marling as a persona’.

LM: Yeah, how fucked up is that!? [Laughs] Talk to my analyst.

TJ: I read that you were studying psychoanalysis, Laura.

Has that played much of a part in what you’re doing lyrically here?

LM: It did have quite a big effect on the lyrics. My glos-

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Final Third: In Conversation sary was psychoanalytic terminology. And also psychoanalysis, which is generously a very soft science – it’s not very rigorous.

So it’s quite weirdly poetic, because it’s trying to describe things that are very intangible. And that was what I enjoyed about psychoanalysis as well. It has a lot of language to describe intangible experiences, which I think gives that ominous sensation.

Particularly ‘Red Snakes’, which is all psychoanalytic imagery. I like it as a poetic source.

TJ: So you recorded this a couple years ago, in 2019, but paused on the release during... everything?

ML: We both had other projects out last year and made a conscious decision to not put this out until we could just be in the same room again and connect in that way.

TJ: Weirdly, the album sonically feels fitting for this time. Obviously, it wasn’t recorded during the pandemic, but it marries this exploratory imagination and possibility with an undercurrent of darkness.

LM: Yeah, there is this mournful hedonism. I hadn’t thought about that, but maybe it is a good thing for this time – especially this weird, anxious time. People are trying to conceive of a golden age that’s coming, where we will feel comfortable being out and partying again, but I think there’s gonna be months and months of this weird, anxious time. So

it at music shows too, that physical, energetic thing – whatever it is when you’re looking at an amazing painting and it devastates you. I really want that. I think there’s going to be a public mourning period before it becomes ecstasy, for people who have had an existential time maybe.

ML: It’s interesting that these things have been around us for our whole lives, and we take things for granted. That experience, that emotional thing of being engulfed by art or something that speaks to you, personally, that you haven’t been able to do for a while. It’s going to reflect on the situation that everyone’s dealt with.

LM: Exactly, it’s gonna be loaded with meaning.

ML: The fact that a lot of people died, we’ll never have that experience again. I think, as you said, that’s what people get when they go to see bands. It’s different when you’re playing on stage, but I love to go and see bands as well. And I think that feeling where you’re in amongst people when it’s happening in the moment, and the sounds coming out and there’s joy, there’s sadness, or there’s euphoria – that has been lost for so long now, it’s an alien feeling.

TJ: We touched on the hedonism element of the record, and I wondered if this creature experiences the real world repercussions of that, or is it more Dorian Gray style?

“Laura Marling as a persona began at 15 or 16, and this one began at 28, which is, you know, very different” yeah... listen to the Lump album to help you through!

ML: Well, it’s got an escapism aspect to it, in the way we wrote it and the way that it sounds. Part of that’s quite apt when people want to think about alternate realities of certain things that are going on.

TJ: How has the past year been for you? Obviously you’ve both been putting out your own projects, but for everyone it’s been a really weird, tough, precarious year.

ML: Personally, my experience of lockdown was quite sweet. My studio’s in the house, I got engaged to my girlfriend, I made lots of good music which is going to come out hopefully with the next Lump record, and I’ve been mixing records for people remotely, walking along the beach. But in terms of the rest of the world, the year’s been a total disaster.

LM: I had most of my year like Mike’s. But then in the last couple of months, I’ve had a couple of people die. The experience of death has been making me think about what is maybe a more universal feeling. I never was bothered by art galleries, I’ve loved going to art galleries and whenever we’re on tour I try to go to cathedrals or whatever. But it’s never been a huge deal, and I didn’t really think about it the first year of lockdown. But now, I really want to go somewhere and be spiritually devastated by something. I really want that feeling. And you can have

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ML: I like that that’s what you get from it.

LM: I guess there’s references to time passing and to angst, so I imagine that there are anxious consequences to hedonism. Mike, do you really engage with the lyrics? I don’t know what your experience of listening to the album is like.

ML: I listened to it on the train on the way down, great lyrics I thought! [Laughs] When you first write them I’m so in the moment I’m not really aware of the gravitas of the lyrics. I’m just trying to think about the timbre and the feel, and it does take a little while for everything to sink in. I definitely don’t always understand the narrative, if there is one that you’re trying to tell, or the roots of some of those phrases.

LM: Best not to pull at that thread.

ML: [Laughs] That’s why it’s nice to not pull at the thread.

I think that the lyrics are poetic and twisted, and they speak in different ways, but Laura knows something about them that no one will ever know. So we don’t ask each other. Well, I don’t ask you much about the lyrics, I just say things like, ‘bad ass!’.

LM: [Laughs] Or “Stop singing in an American accent!”

TJ: How does that collaborative process work? I know you mentioned the time signatures being tricky, so Mike would you ever feed back if a lyric didn’t necessarily fit the timing? Or do you both keep that relative autonomy?

Final Third: In Conversation

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Final Third: In Conversation

“There’s lots of wigout potential.

I was in here last night alone wiggin’ out”

ML: We’ll discuss things like that, I might suggest trying things in a certain way.

LM: He also might say “I’m not feeling that”, and usually I agree. Sometimes you’re trying to trim something around the edges and force it into shape, and sometimes it just doesn’t work. And you can both feel it going limp – sorry, that’s a bit gross. Occasionally I cannot get my head around the time signature. And so Mike will literally drum it into my brain.

ML: Yeah sometimes I’d count for you, and for myself.

Because I’m there cursing why I’ve bothered trying to do these time signatures. With ‘Gamma Ray’, which is the hard one, Laura went down to the kitchen and said, “I just need to go down there and figure something out”. I think we’d spent about four hours trying to figure something out over this time signature. Actually at one point while you were down there, I was trying to make the whole thing into 4-4 because I thought “Forget it, it’s not working”. And then about 20 minutes later, you came up with the whole first verse in this excellent format.

And amazing lyrics – hairs on the back of my neck vibe – and laid it straight down. There were moments like that where we

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had to have some discussion, but then she just nailed it.

TJ: You both did, it’s a great body of work. What are your tour plans?

LM: I’m really looking forward to doing it live. We’ve got shows in August and September. The shows we did for the last album were amazing – I mean, amazing for us because it was like a 32-minute album and we made 45 minutes out of it and did it twice a night. I really like that, because I don’t like the commitment of going to a two and a half show where you only know three of the songs.

ML: But we are making a three hour show out of this now [laughs]. It’s quite a complex record so I think it’s going to take a little bit of time to feel fluid, but there’s lots of wigout potential. I was in here last night alone wiggin’ out. So I think it’s gonna be a sonic sound bomb live, hopefully.

TJ: Will the puppet be involved?

LM: If it doesn’t involve the puppet I’ll be very upset. The plan is to have it on a very intricate pulley system.

ML: That’s the plan. Lump – he, she, they... Lump’s gonna be knocking around at the shows somewhere.

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Final Third: The Rates Each month we ask an artist to share three musicians they think have gone underappreciated and three new names who they hope will avoid a similar fate. Ambient duo Space Afrika discussed theirs with Stuart Stubbs

Space Afrika “You can not shake Manchester off of us,” says Joshua Inyang when I ask how things have changed since Space Afrika’s last album, Somewhere Decent to Live, in 2018. What he means by that is that things haven’t changed at all, even though they have.

A couple of years ago, Joshua Reid relocated to Berlin – the first electronic artist in the world to not do so for the music; he just got a good job offer. Whatever the reason, this could have been ravens leaving the tower type stuff for Space Afrika, who’ve been inseparable since they were kids, who held their collaboration together through moves to universities, who have proudly baked the sound of their city into everything they’ve ever done.

It started with ambient techno on their early releases, before Somewhere Decent to Live saw them dive down a beatless rabbit hole, where they’re still enjoying the freedom of a post-club sound that doesn’t rely on a processed kick-drum or an instantly gratifying bassline. Part dub, part ambient, part trip-hop, part something not yet to be named, faint enough to be coming from the room next door, Space Afrika’s music is dark, beautiful, urban, comforting, unsettling and always very Manchester. Literally. When making their last album, Inyang

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and Reid would walk the city streets late at night with their field recorders, collecting sounds they could use in their music.

But Inyang is right – from a listener’s point of view, Reid’s move has changed nothing in the way Space Afrika sound. Last year they released extra-sparse mixtape hybtwibt? (a reaction to the murder of George Floyd, in support of Black Lives Matter) and at the end of August they’ll give us new album Honest Labour. In the absence of 4am city walks together, they’ve been finding samples from Manchester online (“of riots or discussions about housing projects”), and Reid says he’s been listening to more UK music than ever to remind him of home. The result is a record of city soundscapes ominous and seductive, featuring guest vocals from their experimental pals like never before, whispering in your ear as the high street glides by. One guest feature is included in the duo’s picks here – London-based experimentalist and choreographer Bianca Scout.

Inyang and Reid are made for a feature like this, creatediggers as they are, constantly searching for forgotten sounds and artists to inspire them. We begin with the older artists before moving onto the new.

Final Third: The Rates

ZOVIET FRANCE JR: I think we found Zoviet France from one evening of digging through Discogs. We pulled out a few different bands, like Coil, Psychic TV, that kind of stuff, and Zoviet France was one of them. The main reason for giving them a shout out is the raw experimentation. The influences they’ve gone for are ambient, tribal, field recordings, sample recordings. It’s amazing stuff, and it’s quite understated when you put it against Coil and some of the other bigger industrial groups. And the artwork they did, with all the different materials and ceramics and clay, it’s awesome. Really cool, DIY, Northern – love it!

SS: They really embraced the packaging side of tape culture, didn’t they. Is that something you’re interested in for Space Afrika releases too?

JI: I love that question, because one thing I want people to notice – and maybe they do – is that we drive everything to exactly how we want it. We’re super hands on. The packaging, I’m obsessive with this bit. It has to be right. At the end of the day, is you don’t know what Space Afrika is… let’s say we’re a trainer and you walk into Footlocker, if we look like a shit trainer, come on man, no ones going to grab that. But if we look like an

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Final Third: The Rates Air Max, fresh, popping, it’s getting bought. Even if doesn’t suit you. That’s the way I look at it. If it sounds good, great, but if it looks shit I might not buy it. So the way we design it, the importance of the colours of the record, we’re into that heavily.

JR: Maybe not everyone will know this, but if you look at [our records] Above the Concrete, Primrose Avenue, Somewhere Decent to Live and even this one, all the images are actually Manchester, but they’re all in a different context. Our first cassette gives me an industrial feel like Zoviet France.

SS: Were Zoviet France a big influence on your use of field recordings?

JR: I think it would have in a more covert way. More of it is the processing of sound – that dusty element and noise elements of the sound. Not so much on this new record, but some of the earlier stuff they influenced the way we use objects in our music.

BOWS SS: I didn’t know Bows until yesterday.

JI: What a find, right? This new album, for us, had to feel like the UK – not just Manchester, but the UK. This is who we are, this is who we love – the whole Massive Attack, Tricky lineage; being able to maintain your signature regardless of age, because you’re confident in your style. So we were thinking, who’s done this who we don’t know? I was digging, digging, digging, scouring Discogs. Bows were just one of those things where it was like, ‘that’s a dope name; oh, they’re from the UK; damn, that sounds amazing.’ And then going further into the record and understanding the depth of the production, although it’s a simple records, it’s trip-hop, it’s orchestral, it’s classical, it’s ambient at parts. The artwork for Blush is beautiful. I’m picking up this record 20 years down the line and it looks like something I want to buy now. The fact that it’s still relatively unknown gives us this edge that we’ve really found something beautiful that isn’t that common.

SS: Once you listen to Bows you have to ask yourself why they weren’t bigger. It sounds so accessible, why didn’t they blow up like Portishead, for example? Or Massive Attack?

JI: That’s exactly it. How did it get missed!?

SS: Luke Sutherland [one half of Bows] was a touring

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member of Mogwai for years, it turns out, which I think makes sense with some of the twinkling aspect of Bows’ music.

JI: I feel like that time in the UK captures this beautiful energy and willingness to collaborate, with people playing with different friends in bands. And this time around we took that approach, of we love that person, they’re also our friend now, and it just so happened that all the people we love are currently inspiring us and are now on our record.

SHIFTY JR: I’ve been waiting for this one. We’ve got a lot to say about this guy.

JI: Let’s go for two minutes each, so we don’t go too deep.

JR: Where to start? For me and Josh, the first music we were really doing together, listening to and sharing, was grime.

We would write lyrics, we were involved in a local crew of producers and MCs, and in that period of time, 15 odd years ago, the group Mayhem were such bubble in Manchester, which had Shifty, Slay, Hypes, and the interesting thing with Shifty was he was a dichotomy. He was the white MC who was awesome, who grew up in the areas where the Black neighbourhoods were.

One track that made him stand out was ‘Other Brother’, which was addressing themes of vulnerability, which no one else in Manchester grime was doing at the time. Unfortunately, he was involved in a car crash, but he was on the trajectory to being one of the biggest rappers in the UK. JI: Around that time, popular culture and popular music was either on the radio, MTV or you’re watching Channel U. And Channel U was undoubtedly the biggest hub for UK-originated music – experimental, grime, drill. And the reason it was so important is because if you look at the state of UK music, drill, grime, trap is top of the charts – it’s taken these guys 20 years to be recognized. To be able to see a black man wearing a tracksuit earning a lot of money, we were running around in tracksuits being told that grime would never lead to anything positive.

Although you listen to these guys’ lyrics, and they’re clearly immensely intelligent, with their literature, their English, their deliver, their cadence; and it’s always been a case of having this direct experience with the artist. You see them on the channel, you buy their mixtape, but you walk down Market Street and they’re also stood there trying to sell their records with their people, sharing this energy that is truly them. Shifty was that.

TOM BOOGIZM AKA RAT HEART JI: Rat Heart is one of the UK’s most talented producers, hands down.

JR: I would go as far as saying Tom Boogizm is the best DJ on the planet.

JI: Honestly, you go and speak to anyone in Manchester.

And I think every one of his releases has been pivotal for the city.

He’s a guy who doesn’t care about fame, he doesn’t care about reviews, he doesn’t car about getting paid for a DJ show. But

Final Third: The Rates he fucking LOVES music. And that guy is a recluse. You’re not going to see that guy unless you’re in a music setting or you’re at his house. And I feel like there’s a lot of buzz around everyone, but it would be ridiculous for us not to put a light on this guy.

And I think Rat Heart will be the thing that gives him that extra and deserved attention.

SS: As electronic musicians from Manchester, do you feel the weight of the city’s dance music heritage in a similar way to how a lot of young bands do having followed everyone from Joy Division and The Smiths to The Stone Roses and Oasis?

JI: We can give you 50 names right now of people in Manchester who are all popping and lifting the [city’s electronic] scene. Right now it feels like we’re in a period that might mimic that Oasis-type vibe. It might not have to be bands – it might be individuals, it might be a singer, it might be a producer, but I think within six months to a year, it’s going to be painful undeniable.

JR: I also think from speaking to some of the older people in Manchester that were around in the Hacienda period, they say that now is the most exciting period for music – the most super experimental. We’ve got a friend who says, yeah, I was the Hacienda – it was house music. For weeks on end. You come to clubs now and hear post-punk blended with dub, blended with drill, trip-hop. All this exciting stuff. I feel like that’s breaking down the nostalgic side of Manchester.

someone like Cõvco needs to be hightlighted is because she’s a Black female, which is already a challenging position, but she’s a Black female creating fresh and intriguing art. In London! In a completely saturated scene and city. She doesn’t seem to worry about quantity, but she’s dropping quality releases whenever she feels ready. And she works with performance in a really interesting way, with people and bodies. CONSCIENTEOFTHESOUL was performed live, and you’ve never seen anything like it.

BIANCA SCOUT

CÕVCO JR: Cõvco is a DJ and producer based in London, specifically working in the queer Black fem scene, which is obviously underrepresented across the board. Her DJ sets are what I came across first, on NTS. They’re a really eclectic mix of all sort of different styles – some styles I hadn’t even heard of before, like primitive native styles from parts of Africa. And then she dropped a record on Bandcamp a couple of years ago called CONSCIENTEOFTHESOUL, and me and Josh were just blown away by the vulnerability of it. There’s this live element with piano chords and voice. It’s pretty minimal.

JI: It’s like a release. You’re following it down this rabbit hole, but you never really know where it’s going. The reason

SS: Bianca Scout is also heavily influenced by dance.

I think she’s a trained choreographer as well as a musician. While musically she reminds me of Dean Blunt.

JI: One hundred percent. Sometimes I ring Bianca and say, ‘right, let’s work out what the next move is, because I don’t understand how you’re not massive.’ I don’t get it. If anyone is to do significantly well, it should be her, because she lives it. Everything she does revolves around her being creative with music or dance. Her personality is the personality of rock star, or a pop star. She just bounces around. And when she puts her ideas down, the outcome is always fantastic, ethereal, beautiful, and it opens up your mind a bit. I go back to songs from 2015, and it’s like, “What the fuck!”. I’m glad we’ve got her on the album, because anyone looking for us will find her.

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Final Third: My Place

Let’s do a lap A special edition of our My Place feature, not inside an artist’s real life home, but a tour of producer Danny L Harle’s virtual club, which sits at the heart of his new album, Harlecore, by Skye Butchard

At Club Harlecore, the rave never ends. That’s the crux of Danny L Harle’s utopian alternate universe that can be accessed through your browser. In this virtual space, you chase euphoria in four wildly different and equally bonkers rooms, which are each home to a DJ character designed to appeal to a different kind of listening experience. All four of these characters – from the early ’00s makina-inspired MC Boing, to the relentless hardcore kick thump of DJ Mayhem – come together to make a love letter to rave music.

This is a very particular kind of love, born out of years of listening to rave music alone through headphones, disconnected from the culture embedded in the tunes. Surrounded by low-polygon ravers, you experience the private world Harle felt a visceral connection to even at a distance.

“For me, and a certain type of person, this idea of connecting isolated people is a really warming idea,” Danny says. “It’s a very modern thing, this connecting of people using technology.

“These kinds of people used to be completely isolated, and technology has evolved to a certain extent that these people are less isolated, or maybe even connected and isolated at the same time. It’s a kind of paradoxical existence.”

Harle soon found a group of likeminded friends who shared his enthusiasm for this often misunderstood and castaway form of dance music. The early club nights they put on

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cleared a few dancefloors, but they were also instrumental to forming the PC Music sound that’s influenced so many artists.

He’s gone on to work with acts like Charli XCX, Caroline Polachek and Hudson Mohawke, but through it all, it’s that feeling of melancholic and isolated euphoria that he’s chasing.

For him, it could only be fully expressed in this virtual form.

Club Harlecore might seem right at home in the age of online raves and virtual club nights, but where the raves of the pandemic still aim to capture a sense of group catharsis, Harlecore shoots for a kind of introspective euphoria. It’s a stunningly complex project for a debut album, but for all its multi-platform/multi-sensory uniqueness, Club Harlecore is centred on a beautifully simply principle – to sound the way that Danny feels.

“It took me a while to embrace it, because I went through a wild musical journey in the other direction”, Danny says.

“That thing you see of people banging on about complex musical theory and difficult to play jazz rhythms – I was very much into that when I was young. It was music as a mental athletic flex.

It took me until the end of my musical studies to just get real with music, and work out exactly what I liked.

“I realised that I like extremes. For me, this kind of rave music was the most distilled form of what I wanted to hear.

My father [saxophonist John Harle] said to me early on that my own personality was being much more eloquently communicated through the electronic stuff because it was clearly for my own enjoyment. There wasn’t any kind of filter of what serious music should sound like.”

Danny L Harle graciously guided me through Club Harlecore, which he was keen to stress isn’t just his place.

Instead, it’s somewhere he visited that he wants to share with other people.

“There is a known pilgrimage through the club. The club exists in the field amongst the mountains. In a certain state of mind, you can find it. It’s not a physical place that you can discover.”

DJ Danny’s Euphoria Stadium Danny L Harle: People often first find themselves in DJ Danny’s stadium. That’s at the ground level of Club Harlecore. It’s a large circular stadium – this large amphitheatre sort of thing. DJ Danny is less of a human. He’s more of a conduit to a euphoric energy. You see the light come down, and DJ Danny spreads it amongst the people. There needs to be a crowd of people for him to appear. He just disappears if there’s no one there.

Everything in the room is centred around him amplifying that energy. He’s sat with his hands open, around a table of golden CDJs that he uses to create the music of DJ Danny.

Ross [Hudson Mohawke] said to me that rave tunes are often a way for men who are quite frightened of expressing emotions to have a space to feel them, with these emotional melodic lines that you’ll hear in the middle of a very aggressive track. It’s almost like they need a protected shell of a hardcore rave track to experience this fragile emotional moment. I can’t say that I’m concerned with appearing like a manly man or anything, but by creating this space around the emotion, it heightens the ability for me to feel that euphoria.

The visuals came together slowly, as did the concept. I was quite reluctant initially when the idea first came to me, because I knew it had a huge scale to it.

I spoke to Paul Devro from Mad Decent who was like, “Yep. Sick. Makes perfect sense. Let’s do it.” which was a sign that it was the right label for this.

character design by notreal_virtual. images by team rolfes

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Final Third: My Place

MC Boing’s Bounce Room From that point, in the classic club pilgrimage, you find yourself being drawn upwards into what used to be the air conditioning system. It’s a sort of blue, inflatable dome with springs everywhere. As you make your way inside there you hear this very fast, very bouncy sound. There’s a little blue man with a big smile on his face and he talks very fast, and the energy is immeasurable and unlike anything you’ve heard before.

For most people, it’s the kind of thing where they’re never done anything like this before, but they can’t deny the energy and get involved in what’s going on in the room… … Sorry, I’m just thinking about a Spanish translation of Harlecore that described MC Boing as a “blue underpantsed child”, and DJ Mayhem as a bear on fire.

I’m not sure what else to say about MC Boing apart from to say that MC Boing is MC Boing. You know, “MC Boing is bouncing all night. Everybody here is safe and nice...” MC Boing’s songs take less time to write than they do to perform.

Where did he come from, where does he go? There’s a long story about how he arrived there. It involves a big accident that happened… He wasn’t always MC Boing, but that information is unfortunately classified for the time being. And where does he go? No one knows. He’s always in that room.

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DJ Mayhem’s Dungeon After a certain amount of time, people find themselves being drawn downwards, to where they hear the smashing of metal.

The colours get redder and they feel a sense of violence about them. Maybe had too much fun. You find yourself in the basement of Club Harlecore.

DJ Mayhem has a massive hammer. He calls it his skelper.

He smashes it onto his burning pile of CDJs. At the drop of his tracks, instead of listening to it, he’ll just smash everything with his hammer. The drops aren’t actually the sound of his music; it’s just an endlessly smashing pile of CDJs. The purpose of this room is to explore the monster within you, to achieve euphoria though those means. People find them-

Final Third: My Place selves getting smashed directly by DJ Mayhem, it’s quite a shocking experience for them.

The first official Harlecore tracks started being made as DJ Mayhem, which was a conjuring between me and HudMo who was my production hero at the time. There was one point where we were working on a drop for a track. I was going over his shoulder saying, “Oh, why don’t you put that there?” and then realised that I was talking to someone who basically invented a lot of what we think of as relevant for a drop, and I shut up. But he was very polite.

Ross is absolutely brilliant – a naturally occurring artist in the wild, with possibly the least pretention I’ve ever seen anyone have.

DJ Mayhem’s music is halfway between us. It’s not me, and it’s not Ross. That’s where the character became useful, and where the beginnings of the project came from. In my mind, it would be more complicated to present Harlecore as a collaborative rave LP, and get in the way of what I want to say.

Ocean’s Floor After having the living shit beaten out of you by a bear on fire, a lot of ravers find themselves on the floor, opening their eyes.

But to be more specific, on DJ Ocean’s floor. There’s very little known about DJ Ocean. There are reports of bioluminescent flowers, and glimpses of other realms Ocean might come from.

There are rumours that DJ Ocean is a sentry to an event horizon, and not necessarily a professional DJ. This is where the forlorn raver’s who’ve lost their way can go – a place of healing once you’ve explored every element of your own self, so that you can rebuild.

When I first started working with Caroline [Polachek], I was obsessed with the Chairlift song ‘I Belong In Your Arms’, and to this day I think it’s possibly the best chorus I’ve ever heard, bar ‘Kiss from a Rose’ by Seal, which is my favourite song. DJ Ocean came about later, both as a product of necessity and chemistry.

I was doing a Harlecore in New York when this kind of rave music wasn’t as much of a thing. I was very hard pressed to find any DJs who played any kind of music I was interested in. One of the artists I found who was incredibly interesting was Kilbourne, but they unfortunately broke their nose on the night and couldn’t attend. I basically had to invent a bunch of acts to play that evening, one of which was the elusive DJ Fuck, who we haven’t heard a lot of since then, but who might be making an appearance at some point.

DJ Ocean opened the night. It was an act that appeared almost out of nowhere as a collaboration between me and Caroline where very few words were actually exchanged. I started making things and she started singing over it, and it was like, “Yeah let’s just do that at the gig.” Somewhere between there and here, we have DJ Ocean.

The Club Blueprint [page 78] There were multiple iterations of the club layout. It had to be exactly right. I knew when it was wrong, and it became more real the more that we were making it. You’d think it would be the opposite.

“MC Boing’s songs take less time to write than they do to perform”

I can remember going to clubs when I was much younger.

We’d do that thing where you go to a pub, and everyone’s talking – and I like that when everyone’s talking. Then there would be this point where you’d go to a club and the music would be too loud to talk to anyone, and there would be this very strange atmosphere of things getting very serious.

It took me a long time to realise that going to clubs and going to parties were about having fun. I felt a weird sense of obligation to do these things, and when I realised that they’re about having fun I managed to make my own fun out of it.

That’s when I started hosting them myself. I felt like I was taking part in society. You find your own way of doing things that works for you.

Clearing a dancefloor can be quite a good thing, it turns out.

The Discord Server (not pictured) Early on, online chat was an idea, but that wasn’t what the project was about. Fortunately for me, there’s a Discord that’s formed, which I’ve been shown. It seems to have more effort put into it than the entire Harlecore project. The compartmentalised rooms, the custom emojis, the queuing system, the listening parties… it’s quite something really. It’s a dream for someone like me to know that there’s people willing to make that effort to enjoy this thing you’ve made.

In terms of Club Harlecore, online elements would confuse what I was trying to say. This experience of isolated euphoric melancholy is a universally felt thing that’s existed before electronic music. It’s an eternal feeling that humans have always felt.

This is just my way of saying it at this one point in time, and solidifying my appreciation for this type of music that helped me find my way of feeling this euphoria. For that reason, it needs to stand statically as a preserved statement.

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For an album sleeve to be considered TRULY successful, it needs to a.) be designed in a way that sings to its intended audience, and b.) in the case of a fiery collaboration like that of Ball and Boe, mask any residual hatred between the stars involved. Together Again is practically the industry standard on point A, and falls ever so slightly short on B. With an aging audience, clarity is key. That’s just science. You want your fonts to be big and your heads to be bigger (this is called the “him off the telly” strategy). The lads floating above a city at dusk is a brilliantly romantic touch, with the open neck shirts imbuing the sense of yes, I would like to buy the lady a rose. Everything’s working, and although the duo’s famed double B logo is yet to have its desired effect of subliminally infiltrating the judging panel at the Brits, you can currently find it embroidered on Ball & Boe zip-up hoodies in the foyer for the impressively marked up price of £58.95.

But behind the smiles (are they smiles?), there are problems. Ball simply can’t stand it when fans say that Boe looks like the sexy vicar from Fleabag, while Boe resents how Ball can genuinely pull off the line “and this must be your sister?” in reference to a woman who is clearly attending a paid-for meet-and-greet with their daughter.

Ball won this particular tête-à-tête by convincing his rival that they should show their teeth in the photo, knowing full well that Boe struggles with a straight smile, while his looks like the grin of a friendly Yorkshire Terrier.

Well played, Ball. Well played.

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Groovy, baby (ish) I remember seeing this film in the cinema when it came out and nearly wetting myself with laughter. Throwing a 90s revival party for some old school friends I thought it’d be fun to order a copy to see if it’s still as hilarious as we all remember. I went for the old VHS option too to make it extra 90s. Which meant I had to buy an old video player for it on Ebay. And an old TV with the right input. I also needed an old scart cable, which was the hardest to find. But after driving from London to Manchester to pick one up, the party was on, everyone was dressed up and we very nearly watched it to the end.

Everyone was asking the same question: Why has he got his top off?

illustration by kate prior

Gigs are back...

Thu 1 Jul George the Poet Sat 10 Jul GoGo Penguin Sun 18 Jul Nadine Shah Sun 1 Nov Matthew Halsall Sat 6 Nov Christian Löffler

Image: Nadine Shah Photo © Fraser Taylor

Sat 4 Dec Alfa Mist

vinyl / cd / digital