Tirzah – Loud And Quiet 149

Circuit des Yeux, Richard Dawson & Circle, Theon Cross, JOHN, Broadside Hacks, Tonstartssbandht, They Hate Change, Mary Lattimore, Orlando Weeks, The Umlauts, Bingo Fury, Jon Hopkins

issue 149

Tirzah

Great

The

Curator

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Most solo artists, humble or otherwise, consider what they do to be a team effort on some level. For tuba player Theon Cross it’s an ancestral thing (p.28), while Circuit des Yeux was shaken by the loss of collaboration in lockdown as she wrote a new album consumed by grief (p.68). And then there’s Tirzah, who’s excellent new album is abstract and distant but warm and personal, and could only have come from her... and those she works closely with. If we’ve ever featured a solo cover artist who questions why they’re releasing music under their own name, they’ve certainly never mentioned it until now.

Stuart Stubbs

Founding Editor: Stuart Stubbs Deputy Editor: Luke Cartledge Art Direction: B.A.M. Digital Director: Greg Cochrane Contributing writers Abi Crawford, 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, Susan Darlington, Tara Joshi, Tom Critten, Tristan Gatward, Woody Delaney, Zara Hedderman.

Issue 149

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 Cull, Amy Allen, Aoife Kitt, Ben Harris, Colleen Maloney, James Parrish, Kate Price, Matthew Fogg, Morad Khokar, Sinead Mills, Stephen Bass.

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

Jon Hopkins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 08 Bingo Fury . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 They Hate Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Richard Dawson & Circle . . . . . . . . . . 18 Broadside Hacks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 JOHN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 Theon Cross . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 The Umlauts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 Reviews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Tirzah . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 Tonstartssbandht & Mac DeMarco . . . 60 Remembering Leeds Festival . . . . . . . 64 Circuit des Yeux . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 Mary Lattimore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 Orlando Weeks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 03

The Beginning: Previously

Since the last edition of Loud And Quiet

This Woman’s Work Publishers White Rabbit have announced a new book from Kim Gordon and writer Sinéad Gleeson, which Gordon briefly told us about on episode 89 of our Midnight Chats podcast in March 2020. This Woman’s Work: Essays on Music is edited by Gordon and Gleeson, and features essays from award-winning female creators writing about the female artists that matter to them and their own personal experiences. It includes Anne Enright on Laurie Anderson, Sub Pop CEO Megan Jasper on her groundbreaking work at the historic Seattle label, Margo Jefferson on

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Bud Powell and Ella Fitzgerald, and Fatima Bhutto on music and dictatorship. “‘What’s it like to be a girl in a band?’ The oftenrepeated question throughout my career as a musician made me feel disrupted, a freak or that we are all the same,” says Gordon, who’s 2015 memoir was entitled Girl in a Band. “I once asked my boyfriend what it was like to have a penis. To me they are sort of equivalent questions. If it was born out of pure curiosity, it’s understandable. Hopefully this book begins an unravelling of the myth that if you’re a female musician you are a ready-made, easily digestible.” hyperurl.co/ThisWomansWork

The Beginning: Previously Third Man Records Jack White has opened his first record store outside of the US, in Soho, London. This third shop – following those in Detroit and Nashville – is found at 1 Marshall Street, W1F 9BA, and is typically… Jack White-y. Decorated in Third Man’s customary black and yellow colour scheme (by ‘Jack White Arts and Design’), the store features two floors of retail space and a venue called The Blue Basement. It’s also the new European HQ for Third Man Records, the label. Best of all though are the store’s ‘Literarium’ – a token-operated lucky dip book machine; the second of its kind – and a token-operated recording booth where artists and the public can record their own material straight to vinyl.

It’s certainly one way around the current vinyl crisis. thirdmanrecords.com

Sounds Like A Plan Sounds Like A Plan – the podcast all about how the music world is responding to the climate crisis and seeking to become more sustainable – has returned for a second series. Hosted by Loud And Quiet’s Greg Cochrane and Fay Milton from Savages and Music Declares Emergency, this new run of episodes features conversations with Client Earth founder James Thorton, Lauren Sullivan from U.S. climate organisation Reverb and a special conversation recorded in a cupboard with Brian Eno, which will be available from October 12. Search for Sounds Like A Plan on your favourite podcast app. @soundslikeaplanpodcast on Instagram

Blossoms and Rick Astley play The Smiths On September 13, indie band Blossoms and Rick Astley performed the hits of the Smiths at Kentish Town Forum, London. Together.

Aloud. In front of an audience. Who’d paid to be there. The fact that fans will now go to such extremes to hear the music of the Smiths without the need to look at, listen to or be near Morrissey is an act of defiance so brave that it should be applauded, even if Johnny Marr did call the collaboration “funny and horrible.” It turns out that the pairing on the 13th was a mere starter (Astley joined Blossoms at the band’s own show as a cameo that night, to perform ‘This Charming Man’ and ‘Panic’); both acts then turned out for a full night of Smiths clangers in Manchester and London on October 8th and 9th, respectively.

Abba The biggest music news of the last eight weeks has been the reformation of Abba. There’ll be a new album of original material, released November 5 (called Voyage), which is easy to get your head around, and a run of concerts in 2022, which isn’t. Reports say that the shows will be virtual, but performed in real-life, in a purpose-built Abba Arena in London, featuring a live band, who are not virtual, and Abba, of course, who WILL

illustration by kate prior

be virtual, like holograms, but not – they’re called ‘Abbatars’ and must not be referred to as holograms, and have been prefilmed but will be controlled live. We think. By... the band? Or not controlled live. News that both Little Boots and James Righton from Klaxons will perform in Abba’s live band has been largely played down to avoid confusion. abbavoyage.com

Midnight Chats Astonishingly, the British Library Sound Archive has archived our interview podcast Midnight Chats in its entirety. It’s a comfort to know that long after we’re gone, our insect overlords will be able to hear Amy Taylor talk about that time she pissed the bed to keep warm. For the time being, at least, all 114 episodes are also available on all podcast apps.

Apple Music Building on the technology that enables the Shazam app to identify tracks clearly, Apple Music has unveiled a new initiative that will seek to compensate artists for the inclusion of their audio in DJ mixes. The !K7 label, Boiler Room and more are involved with the scheme to provide specialist dance music knowledge.

In theory, it should help make life as a musician or producer that little bit easier at all levels, and has already allowed !K7 to share the ’90s archive of its DJ-Kicks series on a streaming platform for the first time.

Massive Attack On September 10, Massive Attack cancelled their show at ACC Liverpool in protest of an electronic arms fair that will be held at the venue. The band’s show was to be a “super-low carborn” event to test out methodologies the band has researched with University of Manchester to allow bands to perform in a more sustainable way than we’ve ever seen before. “I can’t imagine a more graphic example of the psychosis of the systems we live by than what’s playing out in Liverpool,” said Robert “3D” Del Naja in the band’s cancellation statement. “On the eve of a global event that’s totally critical if we’re to avoid a catastrophic extinction event, arms barons are shop-windowing technologies that inevitably harm and incarcerate people; often in the hands of states already acknowledged to be human rights violators.”

The Ravensbourne Arms The team behind South London former music venue and record label Sister Midnight have launched a campaign to save a Lewisham pub by turning it into the area’s first ever communityowned live music venue and pub. In order to purchase, refurbish and re-open the Ravensbourne Arms – which has been closed since 2016 – Sister Midnight are looking to source a minimum of £500k through a share offer that is open now on the Crowdfunder platform. Shares are £100 each, with a limited number of affordable shares available at £25 for those on lower incomes. www. sistermidnight.org

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The Beginning: <1000 Club

The timeless sublime: only a click away Streaming apps purport to offer the music world at your fingertips, but the globalisation of streaming in its current form often leaves behind the specificities of local cultures. To my mind, Scottish folk and traditional music has long stood as an example of this.

Speaking as someone who’s been immersed in traditional music culture since school, I know that it’s a living, self-sustained ecosystem. But it’s one that only exists as such to those who’ve seen it, lived it and grown up with it. Sure, there are small-scale trad radio stations and magazines, but these most often cater to existing listeners rather than new ones.

Those new listeners are missing out on a lot of essential, heartfelt music. This month, I’m going to be recommending the trad fiddle and piano duo Charlie Grey and Joseph Peach. But first, I’d like to talk about St Kilda.

“To behold a boundless ocean in all the wildness of its grandeur, and to stand at the same time on the brink of an immense precipice, against which mountain-like billows exert their whole strength and fury, must strike any new observer with admiration, astonishment and some kind of solicitous awe.” So said the Reverend Kenneth Macaulay of St Kilda, the secluded Outer Hebridean archipelago to the north-west of North Uist, back in 1764. His words carry with them the ideas of isolation and terrifying beauty that were central to the romanticising of St Kilda during the Victorian era. It was the island at the edge of the world, and remains much the same to this day. Now looked after by the National Trust, St Kilda has stayed remote since being abandoned by the 1930s, visited by bold travellers and those who come to look after the sheep during eccentric working holidays.

We speak about St Kilda a lot in our house at the minute.

My partner is planning one of those working holidays, after a fiveyear obsession that started on a literature course about technology and the sublime. The obsession only grew more severe over the pandemic. She’s aware that the St Kilda in her mind is likely a communal fantasy she’s bought into, passed down through the mythic writing of early Highland literature. But there are ways in which that fantasy is no less meaningful than the island itself.

And the sheep do need tending to.

The sublime remoteness of St Kilda also inspired Charlie Grey and Joseph Peach on their 2018 release Air Lomall. The pair travelled to the island having been fascinated by the legendary stories of St Kilda for what seemed like all their lives. The record ends with a live set from the church on the island. The pair are instinctive, expressive players. The slow airs and strathspeys (traditional forms of Irish and Scottish music respectively) that they write are often informed by modern jazz-flecked improvisation. Charlie Grey’s gutsy, resonant fiddle playing takes familiar melodies from this shared cultural lineage and makes them contemporary rather than nostalgic.

That you can hear this performance from the edge of the world anywhere you are, at the click of a button, captures what

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the sublime means to me. I also studied the literature course from which my partner derives her St Kilda obsession, but it was the material on early computers and Charles Babbage’s logarithms that got me, which is probably why I write a column on streaming.

Without that insider knowledge, though, you’re not likely to know much about this album or its subject matter. Like St Kilda, traditional music is often romanticised for its fringe status and ageless grandeur. It’s culturally important enough to be protected. To those in the know, it’s a mythic beast, but you can’t help but feel that everyone should be able to visit.

That’s not to say that traditional music isn’t hardy or forward-thinking. January’s Celtic Connections was an enormous success in its pivot to a fully-online festival, opting for a crowd-funded investment that gave its performers a much better deal than Spotify or Apple Music. Many traditional musicians have had to rely on teaching, bar work and other ventures to support themselves during the downtime from gigging, and it’s the community-focused approach of Bandcamp that’s been the most supportive when compared to other streaming avenues.

Traditional music has survived in harsher conditions, and the community around it will survive this moment too. But it’s easy to wish for a more localised and community-focused model for Spotify that promotes these distinct shared cultures for a new generation. At the moment, that world is only readily accessible to those who are brought up around it.

Air Lomall has had a bit of a boost thanks to a documentary from BBC Alba on the duo’s trips, but I’d especially like to highlight ‘Gathan Grèin’, their first single from their upcoming album Spiorachas. There’s an ineffable beauty to it, one that perhaps has a deeper pull for those who feel far from home at the moment.

words by skye butchard. illustration by kate prior

The Beginning: Sweet 16

Aged 16, Jon Hopkins discovered cannabis and got patronised by record shop staff

This photo was a really nice moment in Turkey. It was a sailing holiday with my best mate and his family – the only sailing holiday I’ve ever been on; I’m not known for my sailing skills. If you’re talking to a lot of people about what it was like being 16, you’re probably hearing a lot of people talking about how shit it was because, generally, it is shit. This is nice because it was a moment where I was sort of taken away from that for a bit and it was just in this really pristine, beautiful place, sailing around between little coves and sleeping on the boat, and it was a bit of an adventure with my friends. It was a moment of escape from the reality of being a 16-year-old.

It would have been the first time I’ve been away without my parents – although I was with someone else’s parents. At this point, I can’t remember exactly whether my parents were still together, but around then they were getting divorced… we weren’t having holidays, let’s just say that.

Music was a day one thing. I was showing signs of musicality like age two, and I taught myself piano at four. It was my one love, my one obsession, always. But some radical shifts happened around age 16, which are actually important to reflect on for what I ended up doing.

It was when I discovered the combined power of smoking cannabis and listening to electronic music. In my early teens – this would have been 1990-95 – everyone was listening to guitar music; that was the trendy thing and when you’re that age, the only thing that matters is fitting in. So Nirvana and Pearl Jam,

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and we had a metal phase – Pantera, Sepultura. I never had that person that introduced me to loads of music, so in those teenage years I just went with everyone else. I found a lot to love in that music. I loved Pearl Jam: Ten is incredible – that’s such a complex, dark album and was such a massive hit. But yeah, when I was 15 or 16, changing a bit, smoking a bit, looking inward, and my older brother had been given this cassette tape with no tracklisting on it. It was a mixtape, and it had the most amazing stuff on it and we’ve since managed to identify loads: Seefeel, Aphex Twin, Orbital.

Anyway, I used to go on very deep musical dives in my head, whilst getting a bit stoned and just lying there with headphones.

I started going to record shops, and didn’t particularly enjoy it.

I went to Beggars Banquet in Putney, and just started looking around for electronic releases and got patronised a lot by the shopkeepers, but eventually managed to find a few good things.

I started having quite profound music-and-cannabis combined experiences, but in the end it kind of dried up. I went too far with it, and it was as if there was a certain amount of magic allotted to me from that combination, and in the end I was just flogging a dead horse. But I think it sowed some seeds for me.

I was trying to make some of this sort of music, but this was the mid-’90s. These days, you’d be able to get a laptop, or whatever your parents had, and you could get Ableton and then you just start making full quality audio, but back then equipment was an issue, and every piece of equipment did one thing; there was nothing that did everything. I managed to scrape together enough to buy a synth, which cost me £600 – I’d won some piano competitions and stuff. The home computer we had was an Amiga 500, and that did have a little sequencing programme on it that I got free from a magazine, and you could actually sequence MIDI with that, so I started making stuff. But it was shit; I was in a situation where I was able to imagine all this music in my head, but completely unable to translate it into reality. But around then I started playing with Leo Abrahams, who I’ve worked with literally ever since, and is on most of my albums and all of my film scores – he was at school with me.

If I saw my 16-year-old self, I probably would teach him how to breathe properly – a very simple thing. Because you go through all this shit – and I’m sure it’s worse for teenagers these days – and you don’t have any tools for calming yourself down, or realising that it’s actually okay and you aren’t your thoughts.

So I would give him a cuddle first and tell him it’ll be alright, and I would teach him the basic things about calming your body down, dipping underneath your thoughts. I think that should be taught at school, as an urgent priority; so much teenage suffering could be so easily avoided with those kinds of basic principles, of mindfulness and breathing.

as told to luke cartledge

Bingo Fury Where the Beats meet Throbbing Gristle, by Ian Roebuck Photography by Ashley Bourne

The last time Jack Ogborne and I came face to face was lockdown day zero. Tuesday 24 March 2020 to be precise. “We must stay at home!” was the directive and an overwhelming sense of uncertainty filled the air.

“It’s funny to think, isn’t it? Everything that’s happened since,” says Jack today, smiling at the enormity of it all. Eighteen months have passed and Jack’s journey has seen him finish university and move back home to Bristol. He’s also overseen the death of one band and the birth of another, growing up fast in the process. It’s no surprise that speaking to him today feels different, more certain.

It was the enforced lockdown, in fact, that precipitated change. With his post-punk-cum-jazz band Norman turning heads, Jack had experienced a rise in profile – including the aforementioned, never-published interview with Loud And Quiet (the band split up before we could get L&Q in print again) – but bubbling under throughout was Bingo Fury.

“I had started writing for Bingo Fury whilst Norman was going on,” he explains, “close to when I spoke to you before. I felt happier doing a solo project and then when we decided to stop doing Norman it made sense to pick this up.” However, it wasn’t just the pandemic that drew a line through Norman, as a dramatic midsummer statement revealed in 2020. “A member of the band has behaved in a manner that goes against what we believe in,”

read the stark post, something which Jack is at pains to relive in much detail. “All I’ll say is that since the split we have learnt how important it is to communicate, listen and be compassionate to the people around you. Openness is really important and I think we have done a lot of maturing since Norman finished.”

Musically, the two projects aren’t too far apart, and Bingo Fury is still outrageously tough to pigeonhole. In Jack’s words, it sounds like Throbbing Gristle mixed with The Strokes doing James Chance, a description that stuck with me from last year’s meeting, but there is something about the fresh material that’s fully realised, with a considered touch. “We carried over some ideas from Norman so it feels like a natural progression and some of the same people are involved. It’s great having a clean slate to present right from the beginning rather than having the growing pains of the band on show. We were playing shows with Norman and I think people could see it was disjointed, but with Bingo Fury everything feels solidified and whole, you know.”

I mention how Jack looks more comfortable in the Bingo Fury skin, which he emphatically agrees with: “Yeah it feels different as it’s essentially a character; it’s more detached from individuals and feels slightly separate to me. I felt it was an exciting way of changing things up and it’s cool to have the creative output where we can really focus on the visual aesthetic too; we wanted to play around with the format, take us somewhere we weren’t familiar with in the form of a character.”

The visual aesthetic is closing-time cabaret starring a classic dirty stop-out songwriter, and Jack plays his deadpan role to perfection. “Thanks,” he says with a laugh. “I see it as an opportunity to create a more idealised version of myself and my songs. There is certainly a cinematic element to it for me too, where the presentation of ‘Bingo Fury’ comes from a lot of films that I like. To give an example, maybe John Lurie in Stranger Than Paradise, it’s slightly gritty but has a ’50s classic feel to it.

Broadway sheen, yes, but slightly more budget.”

Jack seems to find safety in his piano noir balladry as if he’s playing a part, which makes sense the more you hear him talk about it. “It’s all fictional you know, I can make the character do whatever I want them to do and it has nothing to do with real life; it’s liberating and makes it easier to be vulnerable.”

— God bless David Berman — Like everything else with Bingo Fury, it seems the writing has matured moving from project to project. The sketch-like precariousness of Norman has given way to a deluge of defined

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beat poetry, something which Jack admits he follows for structure. “I like the disjointed but frank nature of that, so I guess I use that style as a template and then the actual content can come from wherever. When I was a bit younger, more of the beat stuff like Frank O’Hara was my influence, but now my main inspiration is someone like David Berman – he really had an impact on me. He is kind of devastating, hilarious and moving in equal measure. The Natural Bridge, the second Silver Jews album, I think I have listened to that the most this past year, and then words have become more significant to me in the run up to Bingo Fury’s releases. If I’m happy with a set of lyrics, I get more fulfilment through that than through the music, to me it’s more of a challenge.”

The lurching, off-kilter jazz rhythms that underpin Bingo Fury tracks could almost be understood as characters in themselves; I ask Jack how he creates the mise-en-scène to fit his lounge lizard persona.

“A lot of the time I try to recreate the feelings that I get with a totally different type of music, that’s how I come up with

something interesting. I try and pick things outside of my own realm and a lot of what’s going on in Bristol has shaped that.

Going to shows in Bristol and seeing such a variety of interesting music will always impact whatever I make. Real underground and leftfield stuff, artists like Giant Swan, Lice and Scalping, they have been as much of an influence on me as hearing Tom Waits for the first time. They don’t sound anything like me but you can go to an industrial gig and take the intensity you get from that and translate it into your own language, with a different arrangement. That’s definitely been amplified moving back here.”

As we say goodbye a second time I find Jack a more grounded, confident artist, someone who’s found certainty amongst the madness and who’s hometown has steadied his direction. “It’s true,” he says. “These Bingo Fury songs really take me back to the start of lockdown when we last spoke, where I would go on long walks around late at night and I couldn’t bump into anyone. Such a bizarre time and a bizarre feeling for everyone, but look where we are now.”

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They Hate Change Born in Tampa, raised on every UK sub-genre imaginable, by Katie Beswick. Photography

by George Goldberg

“We’re super interested in that, yeah,” Vonne tells me. Vonne (who uses they/them pronouns) is one half of the Tampa hip-hop duo They Hate Change. I’m telling the duo about Basildon, the dilapidating concrete Essex New Town that produced Depeche Mode in the 1980s. I’ve gone fairly deep on the history of post-war New Town development and the rise and fall of the welfare state, and, despite the fact we are here to talk about They Hate Change, Vonne and bandmate Andre are leaning into their computer screens listening intently.

“Yeah, yeah,” Vonne says, when I’ve finished speaking.

“Exactly on that level. That’s super interesting to us.”

They are not taking the piss.

“We love y’all,” Andre says.

They Hate Change are self-taught students of British culture and music, inspired by a huge variety of genres and movements and keen to learn all they can about the social and political climates that produced their favourite sounds.

Vonne nods. “I think at this point we definitely self-define as Anglophiles. I dunno where that comes from at all. I think we’re just into music from the UK.” “Hell yeah,” Andre interjects.

They speak in this rhythm throughout the interview, Vonne offering lengthier answers and analysis, and Dre interjecting with lively affirmations to imply that Vonne is speaking for them both.

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“It’s not that stuff from America isn’t interesting,” Vonne continues, “but there’s an entire separate music culture. We’re from here. I’m not gonna say we know everything about here, but learning about, you know, the Thatcher years over there and learning about the music that happened during that era, it’s like damn. That was a whole thing that happened over there that we had no idea about.”

They reel off a list of genres – happy hardcore, street soul, jungle, UK garage, grime – and an eclectic list of artistic influences including Goldie, Brian Eno, D Double E and Dizzee Rascal... “And Kiwi Records is doing kind of like a new UK garage situation right there,” Vonne tells me, rapid-firing with enthusiasm for the UK scene. “Leading the charge for that – Sharda, those guys. That stuff ’s really cool! My man Novelist, remember he was pushing a genre for a year or so, called rough sound? Rough sound is like 160bpm and it’s like… I don’t think he’s on that anymore. Whatever’s coming out of Manchester right now… India Jordan, the DJ producers spanning that whole history of club culture.”

“Mmm hmm,” Dre affirms. “That’s right!”

This kaleidoscopic range of influences is reflected in the weirdness of They Hate Change’s sonically packed music, which some critics have hailed as hip-hop avant-garde. Dre laughs when I bring that up, and then reassures me.

“No, Katie, it’s not a bad question…”

“It’s as avant-garde as you want it to be,” Vonne explains.

“We don’t really stand on it in this posturing way. We are just trying to push things as far as we can, so if it ends up sounding or feeling avant-garde then that’s why. We’re just trying to push things further and further – we’re not trying to do some crazy shit for the sake of it, that’s not our vibe.”

Nor do they expect their listeners to have the same musical palate.

“It’s not trainspotting or whatever. It’s not like, ‘Oh, you never listened to Shy FX before, therefore you can’t get into it… if you don’t get it that’s why.’ And it’s like, nah man, the music should be able to stand on its own, regardless of the records it references. You shouldn’t have to know Kraftwerk’s whole catalogue as the entry point into the music. It’s like, ‘Is the music good? Did you make a bunch of good songs? Cool.’

Then we can get into the references later on, that’s not on the face of everything.”

— A certain radio — As they lead up to their forthcoming album release in early 2022, Vonne and Dre have recently dropped the video for ‘Faux Leather’, an electro/jungle/hip-hop mash-up. The video references the album cover for English post-punk band A Certain Ratio’s 2002 record, Early. The single and music video have produced a buzz for the pair – they’re particularly excited about BBC radio plays, and an interview they gave on Radio One. “We approach everything in this way that it can seem like a hair-brained scheme, you know what I mean?” Vonne says, “Like, ‘hey, so what do you want to do for a music video?’ ‘Well, there’s this album cover we want to reference.’ But to put it out

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there and have people respond to it in a really great way, that’s amazing. It feels so good.”

“That was surprising,” Dre says. “It was like, ‘Wow, they like us.’ And [for listeners] it was a bit of a glimpse into our influences, whether, like the beginning of the video or towards the tail end at the corner store, in a garage or house party, just performing.”

“Yeah,” Vonne agrees. “The response has been great.

Interviewed on BBC Radio One! That’s crazy, you know what I mean? We’re super hyped on that, super hyped on the response.

We’re super grateful for it. And honestly, we think there’s a lot of stuff in our catalogue that, if the same people heard that stuff, it would have been through those same channels as well. We’re just excited now that we’ve broken down those barriers, because our new stuff is only better than what we did previously.”

Previously means the music they’ve been making since they were teenagers. The pair met when Dre moved from a small town in upstate New York to Tampa, a city on Florida’s Gulf coast.

Though some of the mainstream music he’d listened to back on the East Coast was popular in Tampa, the South offered a whole new menu of culture and sound. Fascinated by the hyper-local music styles his Tampa friends introduced him to, such as Jook, a Florida twist on hip hop, he got together with Vonne to produce his own beats. Using FL Studio, the two experimented with local and world influences, utilising the internet to understand how global music cultures such as hip hop and electro took on hyperlocal flavours in different places. Soon, they were sharing music with peers curious to know what the pair were doing while they hung out together.

“We were sampling and trying whatever we could basically,” Dre says. “Just trying to do it.”

“Just doing it,” Vonne expands. “And I was rapping. I’ve always been rapping. So, we would basically be making tracks for me to rap on, but then it started evolving once we started hearing different musicians. It evolved into us realising, ‘Ok we can produce just to produce; we can put out instrumental music.’

So, we started trying to do that, you know? Until we kind of landed on the style and direction we’re in now where we’re both rapping and both producing.”

If the music they love is birthed out of the turbulence of a specific late-20th and early-21st century socio-political atmosphere, they recognise that the same is true of their own sounds.

But, unlike many artists right now, the duo have no interest in making direct political statements.

“We’re inspired by the feeling… a lot of these different musics were borne out of something, like the political climate – even if you think about early hip-hop, like obviously that’s borne out of a certain thing that was happening in New York at the time. With us, the politics in the music is clear if you are on our side,” Vonne explains, “and if not, it would be completely foreign to you, you know what I mean? I think that’s kinda the way we want to keep it. I think a lot of times if your message is too political it’s easy to manipulate, do you know what I mean? We want to say it to where it’s clear enough for the people that are supposed to get it. But to everyone else it seems like static noise. We’re not making Trump-era music or anything like that, but at the same

“It’s not trainspotting or whatever. It’s not like, ‘Oh, you never listened to Shy FX before, therefore you can’t get into it’” 15

time, when we decide to pull from different places that energy is kind of there. We might pull from a certain thing unconsciously because this feels really hopeful and really happy, and it just so happens that we were pulling from this era and this is why it’s like that. I think in terms of creating our music I don’t think we consciously go….”

Dre jumps in: “‘This is gonna be at a protest!’”

“Yeah. Like, not to talk about other artists and stuff like that, but I read something where the artist was saying that they wanted it to feel like the protests that summer when they recorded the music, and it’s like, alright man, come on.”

“Let it happen.”

“Yeah, that feels kind of whack.”

“Mmhmm.”

— Final proving ground — Nowadays, the process of making has barely changed from the duo’s early years (though they’ve jettisoned Fruity Loops in favour of Ableton, which they explain is better for transferring compositions to a live context). The two still get together, hang out, make playlists and jam around the feelings created by particular tracks or movements. Unlike musicians who work from technique, using music to innovate through a commitment to craft, They Hate Change begin with a love of music and push at the possibilities of transmitting feelings. For their current project the playlist is just as eclectic as you might expect, given our earlier conversation.

“Robin Hannibal, DJ Rashad, Dizzee Rascal, Rock Marciano, Yoko Ono, Neneh Cherry – amazing, just like a crazy influ-

16

ence on us – D’Angelo, SWV, Washed Out, Clipse, Harmonia. It’s all over the place,” says Vonne. “Bobby Humprey, Z-Money… it’s a lot of stuff, but all these different songs have these feels that we’re just like, ‘We wanna achieve something here.’ We’re just very inspired by this – this makes us want to rap; this makes us want to produce. So having ‘Buffalo Stance’ on that playlist, you know, that just does a thing to us. We’re not trying to make songs that sound like ‘Buffalo Stance’, but here’s a record that really gets us going in terms of music creation in general. We make these long playlists, whatever, like this is how we feel, or this is how we wanna feel. We’re just making it as if no one is watching still. Cos having the pressure of ‘Oh, it’s album time, this is for the album’, it’s kinda whack. We just keep making stuff in the way we always made it.”

Once the record’s down, They Hate Change are set to tour North America with Shame. I ask, of course, if they’ll be in Britain any time soon, even though the pandemic makes any planning virtually impossible.

“Come up to the headquarters?” Dre asks. “We’re trying to.”

“Not yet,” Vonne says. “That’s our final proving ground, you know? Over there. Over here I think we can do a lot and, in the way that we’re pushing genre and that, we can impress people over here, like, ‘I never heard anything like that before.’

But we not just about to step into the UK and they’re like, ‘Oh you’re doing sub-jungle, oh word.’ Like… you know. We can’t come half-stepping over there like we’re real junglists or whatever we might be doing. It’s like we really have to show and prove over there. So we’re really excited to do that soon. But we’re really coming with it. We can’t half step, at all.”

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Richard Dawson & Circle

The outsider folk icon and Finnish metal giants have come together to make an album all about plants, by Fergal Kinney 18

The first time Richard Dawson ever saw Finnish rock group Circle, he barely heard them over the sound of his own voice.

“I came to see them in Byker supporting Acid Mothers Temple when I was 21,” he explains, his tone shifting from enthusiastic to a slightly guiltier register. “I went with a girl that I was trying to impress, and she wasn’t really into it.” A pause. “I was actually into it,” he insists, building up a head of steam, “but she wanted to go somewhere else to talk so we ended up back at the bar and talked through Circle’s set.”

Circle guitarist Janne Westerlund sits on the Zoom call smiling benevolently. “I wasn’t the only one talking – I wasn’t that guy,” qualifies Dawson. “I’m sorry Janne.”

In November, Richard Dawson and Circle release Henki, a collaboration between the Newcastle singer-songwriter and the cult Finnish group whose reputation for spandex and self-identification as the “New Wave of Finnish Heavy Metal” belies a career that’s a Rubik’s Cube of all possible intersections between metal, Krautrock, jazz, psychedelia, stoner rock, ambient and art rock. Formed in 1991, in the Finnish seaside city of Pori, the band’s early shows were ritualistic affairs including nudity, fluorescent body paint and dead fish before developing into the kind of serious, non-conformist institution comparable only with Faust or The Fall. Dawson and Circle share more than just a Stakhanovite work ethic (Circle have released over fifty albums) – their output is at once ancient and futuristic, both medieval history documentary and science fiction cinema. Both are serial collaborators too, but for Dawson, this one was special.

Time passed, and the promoter of that Byker show – perhaps sensing that more attention could have been paid – handed Dawson a bootleg copy of the concert he had chatted through. It consisted of essentially one riff played to pulverizing repetition for half an hour. Dawson was hooked.

“Shortly after that, I was working with Ben Jones and Alt Vinyl, and he was a massive Circle fan,” Dawson explains.

“One day, he was playing [2007 Circle album] Tower, and I was like God, what is this? It was one of those obsessional moments where you just have to gather everything.” Speaking to The Quietus in 2019, Dawson described the Holy Trinity of his musical influences as Sun Ra, the French electronic composer Eliane Radigue, and Circle.

When Janne Westerlund first heard the music of Richard Dawson he was prudent enough to remain silent. Having chanced upon a review of Dawson’s 2014 album Nothing Important, he decided to investigate.

“I was totally amazed by it,” explains Westerlund. “I just listened to the other albums and within a day I had become a massive Richard Dawson fan. At that time, I still used Twitter, and dared message him saying that this is fantastic stuff. I was really surprised when I got his reply – ‘Wow, this guy read my message!’ He told me that he was actually a massive fan of Circle.” The pair began a conversation, both self-effacing figures surprised to find an admirer in the other. Both began privately contemplating a collaboration. “I kept thinking, ‘Should I dare ask Richard really?’” reflects Westerlund, “But I did, and that was the starting point.”

Dawson takes a deep breath. “It was a big email for me to receive that, put it that way. It was like a dream. I’d had those same thoughts but I wasn’t close to asking. Like everything, it feels very in the fates.”

Circle then invited Dawson over to join them for a performance at Helsinki’s Sideways Festival. Dawson wasn’t entirely sure what the group particularly had in mind – a couple of tracks on stage perhaps. Circle had other ideas. Why not write and rehearse an entirely new set in 48 hours? During rehearsals, Dawson remembers Westerlund suggesting that the musicians stop being so straightforward and start behaving more like a plant. This would prove important.

“It was a very, very intense event,” says Westerlund calmly of the show that followed, “and very exciting. I must say, I was a little bit nervous because it was hard for us too, and you never know beforehand what the chemistry will be like when you share the stage. You don’t know that before you do it. It was like a revelation. We all found it very easy, actually, to play with you.

It was a very important experience.”

“I had this moment where I looked around,” remembers Dawson, “realised I was on stage with one of my favourite ever bands, and then realised that I couldn’t remember any words.

And then I realised it was probably the biggest audience I’ve ever played to. I could not grasp the words, I was going to bomb. And then… it just happened.”

The Helsinki set would not be the last time that Circle’s powerhouse approach to graft took Dawson by surprise. Once recording sessions began in earnest – in their native Pori – Westerlund recalls extended sessions without rest or sleep, where “nobody dared say how physically tired they were getting.”

“I had to lie down halfway through and shut my eyes,” concedes Dawson. “I was absolutely done. I felt I was going to fall to bits and really didn’t want to do that in front of everyone.”

Mercifully, by the time the pandemic hit, enough material had been recorded to ensure that the album could be completed whilst travel restrictions remained (indeed, Circle and Dawson are still yet to be reunited). This would shape the album in crucial ways, affording Dawson more time to work on lyrics.

— Plant life — While you were watching Tiger King, baking and staring into the void, Dawson and his partner Sally Pilkington aimed to record an ambient record every day during lockdown – eventually releasing fifty such releases on Bandcamp by August 2020 under the name Bulbils – whilst Westerlund bunkered down and focused on his carpentry course (now close to graduating, he joins us today in a short break from sanding down a cabinet). All the while, Westerlund’s guidance to Dawson and the band had planted a seed.

“I kept thinking about it – imagining music as a plant,” explains Dawson. “I’d liked some plant based records before.

There’s a great record called Patterns of Plants by Mamoru Fujieda, where the music is derived from data collected from the surface electricity of leaves, scored for traditional instruments.

There’s a few other plant records. I didn’t think there had been

19

a plant metal record, though, or a plant rock record. So you just think about it. The last few albums of mine, I’ve been trying to get different perspectives on time, so maybe by engaging with plants that would afford me a different perspective on time.”

If you’re looking to understand Richard Dawson’s output over the last half decade, look not to another musician but instead to Hilary Mantel. Across the Booker Prize-winning novelist’s Wolf Hall trilogy, through a detailed and total recreation of Tudor England – and a process she describes as communing with ghosts – Mantel has used the past to say something important about England now, and the way that the past holds hands with the present. In a revealing moment in a recent interview with US YouTuber Anthony Fantano, Dawson hinted at a belief that the present day may be able to influence events of the past in much the same way that past events alter the course that leads us to the present. Consider this when listening to Dawson’s peerless 2017 album Peasant – a series of character vignettes drawn from life in the fifth and sixth century Kingdom of Bryneich (that’s some of south-east Scotland and much of north-east England) – and his 2019 album 2020 – a series of character vignettes about life in the modern north-east.

Where Peasant involved a level of research more synonymous with academia than indie music, Dawson began to look into historical figures who might be useful to this new plant

Dawson. “The system that the civilisation was basically built on was something that they couldn’t control. It’s like the building of the house on sand. When they overharvested it, they just took too much, and I’m sure you can draw the parallels with what we see today with lots of things. That got me thinking about that city and merchants who had built their whole trade on it. I was thinking a lot about vape shops, and how tenuous a business that is. I know that sounds ridiculous, but in a few years’ time if vapes are discovered to be incredibly harmful, what are all those tradespeople going to do?”

— Ghost stories — Only one track on the album – the storming glam metal chug of ‘Lily’ – is unrelated to plants. “We have a lot of ghost stories in our family, we even have a headless railway guy,” explains Dawson. “The one detailed in the song is when my mum was a trainee nurse. She had to go to a different hospital and they had a very old fashioned, very long ward with about twenty beds on either side. She could see a very old woman stood at the end of the bed. She’d walk towards her, but by the time she’d get there, the woman would be gone. She said she saw it three times.”

Did the figure vanish? “This is it, it’s not that she vanished, there was no moment where she disappeared, but by the time

“I had this moment where I looked around, realised I was on stage with one of my favourite ever bands, and then realised that I couldn’t remember any words” project. Isabel Clifton Cookson was a 20th century Australian botanist whose research transformed studies into the earliest arrival of plants on Earth. One of the earliest plant genus was named Cooksonia in her honour, as was the first track on Henki.

“I couldn’t find an awful lot on her,” explains Dawson, “the library I use is a great library but there wasn’t much there.

I didn’t want to speak about the science too much, more the idea that people could turn themselves back through time with concentrated thought. In this case, the world before there were plants on the land. Once you know it’s not going to be a thorough biography of someone, you kind of have to go the other way.”

Dawson’s research similarly led him to the history of silphium. Silphium is a historical plant whose identity has never since been discovered, but became central to the Greek and Roman economies (indeed, so central to the ancient North African city of Cyrene that it was the emblem on their coins).

“It was both aphrodisiac and contraception,” explains Dawson of its function, “which is a great contradiction. It was in food, as a seasoning. I think it was burned too, as incense.

It had all these great qualities, and it was incredibly prized but they couldn’t control it.” The contemporary love heart symbol (immortalised in Dawson’s 2019 track ‘Heart Emoji’) may even have originated from iconography of silphium. “It seemed to me that there was something quite pertinent about this plant, which was so treasured, but they never learned to cultivate it,” says

20

she got there, she was gone. The nurses were just like ‘Oh yeah, that’s just Phyllis’. Apparently she was a very obsessive woman who would never stop washing her hands. She had died there some years before.”

For both Dawson and Circle, the collaboration has fertilised new modes of creativity that one suspects they will be pruning for years to come.

“Because of our discussions, I have decided that I’m going to start writing entirely in Finnish,” explains Westerlund. “We talked about literature and poetry and lyrics, and you gave me the courage to use my mother tongue, which I’ve always found quite hard somehow, but you’ve opened my mind.”

Dawson agrees. “For me, it’s been quite a life-changing thing. I’ve always been quite positive, but I didn’t really believe that what you were telling me around the show was possible.

And to make it through sheer force of will, and luck I suppose, I feel like I’ve been able to take it on since then and apply it to other things. No! You can do it!”

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All your favourite players in one Sunday League team, reinventing century-old folk songs, by Tristan Gatward Photography by Sophie Barloc

Broadside Hacks At first glance, Broadside Hacks seems to have the choir effect: a friendly pyramid scheme where you fill your band with so many members that enough of the extended family will pay for tickets to see you play. Friends of friends are grazing on the grass at End of the Road festival’s Piano Stage, where dragonflies ricochet from Speedy Wunderground t-shirts to carefully, casually slung dungarees and well-cut mullets, while the twelve players in this iteration of an ever-changing collective can barely fit on the stage with their instruments.

Broadside Hacks is not a usual supergroup. It’s not strictly even a group. Purveyors of a new folk revival, its ringleaders seem as delightfully bemused as the rest of us, tangled in an excitement that’s brought the biggest crowd of the weekend to this part of the woods. Its founder, Campbell Baum, from Dominosigned band Sorry, bookends one side of the stage, sitting on an uncomfortable-looking bench with a banjo strapped to his chest, while Blaenavon’s Frank Wright – now of Organ Morgan – stands against the opposite wall, playing through traditional Scottish reels and deep roots music, interspersing folk ballads and laments. Between them sit members of Caroline, Goat Girl, Matthew Maltese, Rosie Alena and more – the good and the great of South London’s musical export on vocals and clapping.

“Every gig has a different line-up,” says Campbell, after their set. “We were missing a few people who have done most of our gigs so far, but others had come in for the first time.”

“Yeah, it’s really just whoever shows up,” says Frank.

“The nature of the project is that it’s pretty dynamic. We’ve done gigs without all of us before. We’ve done a gig without you before, we’ve done a gig without me. It does work.”

The trajectory of this collective-cum-record label has been largely unintentional from its beginnings as a group of friends meeting up and playing a few songs, explains Campbell. “We do this regular night at the Skehan’s Free House [in Nunhead], and over lockdown obviously everyone was around so we could start this and get it off the ground. But I think now people are going away again it needs to keep on going by itself, too. It’s good to get in the swing of doing it without everybody being there.”

22

“And we’re not exclusive with it,” adds Frank. “Anyone can come. It kind of just became our Friday nights when stuff wasn’t open yet – people would come and they weren’t even playing or singing, they’d just hang out and drink. We just wanted to make people a bit more aware of the songs. And also for people not to think that just because they’re not a folk singer or a folk musician they couldn’t play them.”

— Songs without authors — It’s a young crowd that’s come out to see the set at End of the Road, comprising the same art house ramblers who were wearing Idles merchandise a few years ago, and who’ll be eschewing them to line the walls of Café Oto in a few more to come.

It’s not the demographic you’d expect to see spilling around the dusty paths of a trad folk gig, tiptoeing for a vantage point over the bushes, peeking through the triangular spaces left by stray hands on hips, all to hear an 18th century monologue. But a revival’s not a revival if you’re only talking to the people who listen, and there’s not a safari hat or Fairport Convention shirt in sight. No stragglers of a long lost Newport Folk Festival pining for the better days, grateful to be seeing some proper music at last, or storming out of the Tipi Tent complaining that the last band didn’t even have a guitar.

“I don’t know,” says Frank, “the folk scene can be a bit intimidating. What we’ve discovered since we first started talking about the project is that so many musicians love playing folk music but have never really spoken about it, or haven’t had an output for it. It’s been awesome seeing how everyone crawls out the woodwork when the opportunity comes.”

“So much of Broadside Hacks is just about messing around with these century-old songs and seeing how much you can get out of them,” adds Campbell, visibly enamored by both the human and technical joy that can come from reviving an old story. “There are still so many songs that people don’t know about because they’re just somewhere in a book, forgotten and unplayed. A lot of the time you’re not even given a harmony or

23

chords or anything, it’s just a melody written down. And then there are so many things you can do with it. It feels like a bit of an exercise, the whole thing, seeing how much we can get out of a song.”

The group’s first full band compilation, Songs Without Authors Vol. 1, is a testament to that joy and study, making voices speak across generations. It marvels in reinvention, fortified by folk songs, they say, that find a relevance in all times and places while remaining essentially local. The lovelorn country twang of Katy J Pearson, jauntily singing of death threats from a king to the man who impregnated his daughter, sits gorgeously alongside Aga Ujma’s rendition of a Polish folk song offering advice to a new mother, as Rosa Zajac and Lankum’s Daragh Lynch turn another Child Ballad into a barren drone, and Modern Woman’s Sophie Harris sings an Irish children’s song of optimism and longing.

The only criteria for a song to be played by Broadside Hacks is if someone’s excited about it; if a musician says they’re learning something and asks the band to join the melody or sing along. “There are people from so many different musical backgrounds here,” says Frank. “Jazz, classical, punk, electronic, rock. Everyone has their own approach to music, and it’s so interesting to see it coming together when nobody’s told what or how to play. It’s in the name, as well,” he laughs, mimicking a featherweight hacksaw with his hands. “It’s all about hacking the broadsides, where the old folk tunes were written down. It’s the way they should live on, really.”

— How to revive the totally forgotten — But it’s not just that nobody’s told what to play with Broadside Hacks, it’s that a lot of the time there’s barely more source material than words on a shopping list pinned to the fridge. A couple of lines scrawled in the margins of a page, where folk music lived so fervently in the culture of oral history that nobody thought there’d come a time when everyone forgot about them, before the knight or maid in question could get their camera phone out.

“Yeah, it’s funny,” says Campbell. “When I started learning about old and traditional songs you look at the ’60s revival and lump everyone into the same category because they’re all from the same period. But you get people like Ewan MacColl, who was doing it very traditionally and had a singers’ club where they’d teach you how to sing the songs, and then you’d have Bert

24

Jansch, who sounded very contemporary. We thought that revival was very important in giving a whole new life to these songs. Bob Dylan and Paul Simon, for instance, cut their teeth playing old songs in folk clubs – that was the foundation of their music. But our compilation is definitely reworking, rather than revivalism.”

He pauses. “And then the live thing can be a bit looser… I didn’t want people to learn existing arrangements of songs. I didn’t want this to be a covers compilation; I don’t think it is that. It’s kind of half and half. There’s a lot of original stuff in there but it’s taking the foundation and forgetting the source – finishing it off as if it was your own song, as if you were the author.”

“Hacking the folk songs,” smiles Frank.

“Although Bob Dylan doesn’t exactly credit all of those songs,” Campbell shrugs. “So many of his originals have parts of old folk songs buried away in them. I guess it’d be cool if we could do something to make them seem exciting and fresh as they are.”

“It’s all a constant reinvention,” says Frank. “A reinvention of songs that are begging for a digging up. It’s back to that mission statement. “Where we’d want Broadside Hacks to go in the next few years is to just have more songs, to reach more people and for those people to be interested.”

“And we want to find songs that people don’t know already,” says Campbell. “Say for example, a song like ‘Black Waterside’ that we played today, it’s a very old song but didn’t become popular until the ’60s when a lot of people started playing it – Anne Briggs and so forth. I liked the idea of finding a song that hasn’t been given that spotlight already. It is hard, though,” he continues. “It’s not like when you start a band and can see what you need to do – get signed, release a song. This isn’t really a band, it’s just lots of people. Someone once said it to me that it was like the Sunday League. Everyone plays for other teams during the week and then comes together to be a part of this communal thing. Doing this tour and having this compilation is already a lot more than any of us expected.”

It feels like the revival has started: Modern Woman’s postfolk and Caroline’s trad-leaning sprawls stole the last couple of days here at EOTR, and earlier today Junior Brother played to a toddler dancing maniacally in a James Yorkston cap. The sun sinks to just below the trees where we’re sat, covering us in shade, as Shirley Collins’s voice weaves through the woods, ending her soundcheck. “Her presence is felt,” laughs Frank.

We get up to watch her set begin, and a lot of the audience seemingly brought in by Broadside Hacks do the same.

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THE LOTTERY WINNERS SOMETHING TO LEAVE THE HOUSE FOR

INDIGO DE SOUZA ANY SHAPE YOU TAKE

The Lottery Winners new album, Something To Leave The House For, follows their 2020, self-titled debut, and promises to document the tumultuous times and the path back from despair. In true Lottery Winners style, every truth and life lesson is dressed in glass-half-full, wildly optimistic, radio-friendly Pop, including single Times Are Changing which puts a full stop on pandemic talk and is the soundtrack to hugging old friends, the rebirth of live music and those summer festivals just around the around the corner.

This dynamic record successfully creates a container for the full spectrum—pushing through and against every emotion: “I wanted this album to give a feeling of shifting with and embracing change. These songs came from a turbulent time when I was coming to self-love through many existential crises and shifts in perspective.”

V/A POP PSYCHÉDÉLIQUE

HAND HABITS FUN HOUSE

French Pop - music so effortlessly cool and hip you can’t help but fall in love, Psychedelia - fuzzy dance floor music to lose yourself too. Put the two together and you have an intoxicating mix that is so lush and so perfect, and a sound that has helped soundtrack recent hit TV series such as The Queens Gambit, Killing Eve and The Serpent.

Fun House is Meg Duffy’s most ambitious Hand Habits album to date.

Modern Sky

Two-Piers

Includes tracks by Brigitte Bardot, Serge Gainsbourg, France Gall, Gillian Hills, Stereolab, The Liminanas and Air

Support Your Local Independent Retailer www.republicofmusic.com

Saddle Creek

Best New Track – Pitchfork

Saddle Creek

While Fun House shares some of the same hallmarks as previous Hand Habits releases - a kind of outré queer sensibility, a gentle sense of vulnerability — the record is a marked sonic departure from the often muted tones of 2019’s Placeholder and 2017’s Wildly Idle. Instead, the tracks on Fun House sparkle, moving in unexpected directions and eschewing any specific genre.

Fun House feels ebullient, lush, a fully-realized record

JOHN Two men called John and their overnight success, a decade in the making,

by Tristan Gatward. Photography by Gem Harris

“It’s a bit weird isn’t it?” says Johnny Healey, in a quiet corner of a South Norwood pub, a few doors down from his studio at Stanley Arts. “It doesn’t feel like we’re breaking onto the scene because we’ve been doing it for so fucking long. Like, ten years and you’re always on the cusp. It was nine years of just putting your head above that pit, but this new album is the first time we’ve really started feeling like this could be a proper thing.”

The rise of the tentatively titled two-piece JOHN – so-named after drummer and vocalist John Newton and guitarist Johnny – has been a slow burn. The few hyped-up headlines of tours with IDLES, Mclusky and METZ are important parts of a story that they’re proud of and grateful for, but that serve as little more than a decoy to the greater mission statement of a band that’s lovingly and sustainably curated its own community across the last decade. From their debut album, Godspeed In The National Limit, to its follow-up, Out Here On The Fringes, released in the warning tremors of a global pandemic, JOHN have become the thinking man’s noise rock group; two pariahs on the ambiguous and cinematic peripheries of post-punk, and doyens of its furious and cavernous DIY sound.

“I think we’ve always been interested in that steady build,” says John, “but it’s nice to get recognised, to get picked up by the bigger festivals and get that radio support on the bigger stations. I love that it’s grown in an organic sense. And once you get one thing, other things start to open up.”

“I think the main difference we’ve actually felt is playing shows to more people,” says Johnny. “When we stepped out at Green Man Festival the other week and there were three or four thousand people there you start to think “holy shit, okay, people want to listen.” We ended the last tour in Greece, in Athens, and played this amazing one-off show to 500 people in a country we’d never been to, with no idea that people liked us or even knew who we were. We were on the aeroplane back when the news was breaking about everything coming to a halt. We were really proactive with our time, but with any break you always have that worry that you might have to start building that again.”

Beyond the spectacle of their live show, too – the childish and slightly antiquated wonder that comes from seeing two artists creating a veritable wall of analogue sound in front of you, a magic trick where everyone knows the method but still holds their eyes wide – it has become an important part of JOHN’s creative process. Improvised stretches of guitar allows John to catch his breath between ending the songs and talking to an audience. These more experimental transitions are hard to

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replicate, but become a big part of their third album, Nocturnal Manoeuvres. A series of 7” records released in its wake include a B-side of each album single performed live to no one at the Bookhouse Studio in south-east London.

— To the slaughterhouse and beyond — No aspect of JOHN is farmed out to a bigger team, from the self-designed artwork to collaborations on the music videos, the marketing, and the actual record distribution, where vinyl boxes line the walls of John Newton’s flat, and old t-shirts used as

draft excluders. They even set up their own imprint, Pets Care Records, named after an old pet shop in Crystal Palace, to release their first two records. “Mainly because no one else was going to,” admits Johnny. But Nocturnal Manoeuvres signals the first time JOHN has co-released an album with a label (Brace Yourself), and it contains some of their most idiosyncratic moments as a band. It’s their loudest and quietest work, with their most in-your-face songs and most experimental sonic detours.

“When it actually came to making the album, we realised that we could write these really atmospheric songs that could be longer than three minutes,” says Johnny. Moments of the album would fit more seamlessly alongside Sunn O))) and Godspeed than their punk contemporaries. “We’ve still got those three-minute slaughterhouses, but we’ve expanded on certain sounds like the title track from the last record, which people seemed to love. It’s like watching a Reliant Robin get fitted with a Porsche engine.”

“We’ve honed it quite well, and recently we’ve really started to push it,” says John. “For instance, Johnny’s never sung before.”

“Just because I couldn’t play guitar and sing at the same time,” he laughs. “But yeah, when we recorded the album, we had Dev from Idles do some backing vocals, so I needed to work out how to do it for when we played live.”

— Invaded sleep — It fits thematically that JOHN should be studying their craft for a record that explores the intricacies of continual labour, and furrows the dirt on a 24-hour culture that rewards instant gratification. But there’s no value judgement offered; no oblique criticism beyond realising its peculiar redundancies.

The photograph adorning the front cover, too, is an alluring look inside the iconic Crystal Palace Bowl pictured on their debut album – an austere image that creates an uncanny, endless loop in their discography.

“It became more obvious during lockdown that there are these people working throughout the night,” says Johnny, “these unknown bodies that keep the city running. We were rehearsing quite late, too, and these nocturnal manoeuvres became a really interesting subject for us to think about. When you play a show and you don’t get home until 3am, only to wake up, travel all day, play another show and get home at 3am, you become part of that system.”

“It’s capitalism versus natural order,” adds John. “Invaded sleep. We’ve never wanted to talk about blanketed political themes in our music; we’ve wanted to write vignettes of these everyday moments and through that the politics can come, and people can impose politics on it afterwards.”

It reminds me of a Leonard Cohen quote, that a person’s first rebellious act is the refusal to sleep. “But it’s almost become the other way round now,” says John. “Capitalism has enveloped everything. It’s commercialised sleep. The body’s natural Circadian rhythm becomes interrupted by making money.” Later, on the bus home, billboards advertise mattress sales, and a woman smiles next to a bottle of vitamins with the slogan “aren’t you tired of feeling tired?”. Relaxation apps to help you sleep intersperse songs with neurologically composed frequencies.

“But I’ve always found that my favourite people were the ones who stayed up late and got up late,” says Johnny. “My aunty, who was an artist, could never go to sleep before 4am, and would never get up for any family event before midday. She was always her own person. I loved the idea of people doing creative things at night, when everyone else is in bed.”

“It’s kind of like the Edward Hopper painting [‘Nighthawks’],” says John, “the classic American diner where there’s someone perched at a stool, alone.” It portrays a strangely seductive detachment, an equal ability and inability to exist in an urban space. “We talked a lot about security guards in the city. It’d seem like such a bizarre thing if you came down as an alien to Earth and saw this person protecting a big shiny, empty building. A lot of these new songs are trying to uncover these potentially redundant human conventions that we don’t see because of tradition.

Sometimes we become so clouded in an idea of normality that things don’t get questioned. That’s where art can be the perfect thing to step in and say, ‘What the fuck are we doing?’”

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Theon Cross

The tuba player who’s pushing his instrument into entirely new territory, by Cat Gough. Photography by Jody Evans

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It’s 10.29am and I have to suppress an unbearable smugness at my ability to arrive a whole minute early for my interview with Theon Cross, the tuba luminary, as I’m met almost immediately by the sight of the man himself, pacing downhill from the station, already offering an apology for being late, despite being on time, and with commendable precision. His timekeeping standards are clearly much sharper than mine.

We’re in Catford, south east London, standing outside a mock Tudor style pub, and it feels like it’ll pour with rain at any minute. After a proper hello, Theon dives down to work on getting us through a series of gates and security doors, so we can get inside. But it dawns on me that this isn’t a pub. As he begins expertly keying in codes and unlocking a series of bike chains, I ask how he’s managed to get the keys to this place. He nonchalantly explains that he can access the building (Lewisham Music, a new community music space) “since they named one of the rooms after me.” It’s an impossibly cool response. But just how beautiful this is, far beyond just being a smooth-as-fuck retort to a dull question, becomes increasingly obvious as we get inside.

We walk upstairs and along a freshly painted hallway before we arrive at a rehearsal room full of instruments, with a circular black plaque just outside it with Theon’s name etched into it. He’s seen this plaque before, so whilst I can’t help but take a sharp intake of breath, he just lets out a laugh and unlocks the door. Besides this modest acknowledgement, if you can call it that, of the clear impact he’s had as an artist, his success is not something he mentions.

— Are you even allowed to do that? — Over the past few years, Theon Cross has become notorious for quite fundamentally re-carving the tuba sound. He’s brought it many steps away from its more traditional role within a marching band, as the repetitive, driving, deep bass-note that holds together the whole group, and into something incredibly different. In his hands, the tuba is a melodic, expressive and groove-inflected instrument, and with it, Theon creates a patchwork of sound that’s influenced as much by jazz as it is soca, dancehall, reggae, zouk and sound system culture. And it has unquestionably made this south east Londoner a rising star, and amongst the most respected artists in what’s become the most hyped city in the world to play jazz in. Hence the plaque.

It’s a sound he’s brought to his band, the Mercury-nominated Sons of Kemet – where he plays alongside Shabaka Hutchings, Tom Skinner and Eddie Hick – as well as in his work with the incredible Moses Boyd and Nubya Garcia, and as an “extended

family member” of the Steam Down crew. It’s brought him collaborations with Kano, Little Simz and Makaya McCraven. But the dynamism of his sound is maybe never more apparent than when he’s on stage with Sons of Kemet, and the time comes for a tuba solo. The rest of the band sit back for a bit, whilst Theon sends the crowd into raptures.

It’s a sound that’s the backbone, too, of Theon’s upcoming new solo record, Intra-I, which has been around two years in the making, and is being met with some serious hype. It’s a rare phenomenon in the music world for a record with the tuba at its centre to receive any attention at all.

All this is a far cry from when Theon started learning his instrument. “I think now jazz has become quite cool, but it wasn’t cool at the time. It wasn’t cool at the time,” Theon repeats, widening his eyes and suppressing a laugh, thinking back to his school days. He started out on the tenor horn, when he was eight years old, before switching to the euphonium, and then the tuba at secondary school. He was recruited by a marching band, called the Kinetika Bloco, which geared up young musicians for a workshop every summer at the Southbank centre. “We’d be exposed to music like Fela Kuti, Parliament, Funkadelic, Sun Ra, Duke Ellington. So much music that I wasn’t really getting at home. That was when I first started to enjoy [playing] music, when I was first starting to encounter jazz.”

It’s also where he discovered his love for the muchmaligned tuba. “In a marching band situation, I loved the simplicity of playing something repetitive, but a sound so important in holding the whole, large ensemble together,” he says. “Bearing in mind that Kinetika had like a hundred strong drum section, dance section and brass section. So it made me feel important, and I think built up my confidence around that time on an instrument that was very unusual in most settings, but was so significant in that one.”

Besides introducing him to the beauty of the tuba, and to jazz, the Kinetika Bloco made another vital connection for the development of Theon’s sound. Also based at the Southbank Centre was Tomorrow’s Warriors, the jazz workshop which famously helped to develop the likes of Moses Boyd, Mark Kavuma, Nubya Garcia and Femi Koleoso. Though it was restricted to more experienced musicians, Theon snuck in with his brother, and ended up taking part in the workshops by using the tuba “basically like a frontline instrument, like a trombone, or a saxophone, or a tenor. Luckily, it wasn’t an environment where they said, ‘Ah well, this instrument doesn’t do that, so you can just go home,’” he remembers. “That distinguished me from other tuba players, who would just do the classical. Those work-

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shops made me find my own voice, and my own way of approaching improvisation, which I think a lot of other people on the instrument didn’t have.”

After Tomorrow’s Warriors, Theon went on to the Guildhall, where he studied jazz and developed further this talent for breaking the tuba away from its traditional sound, playing it “fearlessly”, as if it was something more like a saxophone.

“I think with all the jazz background, that helped me in one arena,” he says, “but then joining Sons of Kemet, I was able to express certain types of music, and certain types of rhythm, that I only listened to socially.

“If we’ve had any success, as a generation, I think making it ‘cool’ has been by infusing those other things within it, that people from this country can understand. It’s resonated with the cultural landscape here, and I think that’s by respecting all sides, and by being ourselves.”

— Me, myself and we — It was back in mid-2019, between a Sons of Kemet tour and the release of his first solo album, Fyre, that Theon started to make Intra-I. He laughs off my quiet amazement that at the same time as all of that he was able to compose. “The process has always been alongside all of the different things I’ve been doing,” he says, “but as lockdown progressed, and we were all by ourselves, it was actually something I could continue to work on.”

Besides giving Theon the stillness to expand on the concepts he came up with during his 2019 tours, the pandemic was also an immensely difficult time: Theon lost his father, and

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“My family did the work for me to be able to be here sitting in this room” he experienced anxiety and depression. After the intensity of the grief of losing someone so deeply important, and so close, a lot of people can only anchor onto escape, or switching off, to stop from sinking. For Theon, it wasn’t like that. He took these experiences as a prompt to look inwards, and from that put together an album that is not only spirited but infectiously hopeful, too.

Intra-I sees Theon working with some immense talent to affirm this message. On ‘Roots’, Shumba Maasai’s beautiful vocals speak directly to one of the key messages underpinning the record: “My ancestors there / They’re guiding me / I took a trip to the realms / They reminded me / We’ve got your back / Keep pushing / Keep striding, King!” It’s an idea that was key for Theon, “using your roots to empower you, your heritage, going back to go forward.”

Elsewhere, Theon brought in the energy of Afronaut Zu and Ahnanse for ‘The Spiral’. “‘The Spiral’, for me, is understanding yourself, and understanding your mind, your desires,” he says. “I think that’s the path to overcoming feeling anxious and afraid.

Seeing the energy that Ahnanse gets in, and how he understands dancehall, to Nigerian music, to so much within the space of the Afro-diaspora, he just felt like the right person for the track.”

In between are instrumentals, with Theon’s tuba melodies at the centre. They’re extraordinarily powerful and moving. On one of them, ‘40tude’, there’s some spoken word at the end. I ask Theon whose voices these are. “Those are my grandparents,” he says. “I actually recorded them without them realising.” It’s a conversation about their migration from St. Lucia to London after the war. They were promised that they would be able to make so much money here, that they’d be back home within five years, with enough to live very happily on. But they ended up staying for forty. “And it made me just reflect that if they had only come for five, I wouldn’t be here,” says Theon, “or so many of the West Indians who came here wouldn’t have created the Black British identity, and all that’s come from that one experience, from coming for five, but staying for so much longer and enriching the country in such a big way. So it’s a play on words for forty, but the fortitude of being that generation, able to overcome so much for me to be able to be here.” He laughs. “Sitting in the Theon Cross room, because they, you know… it’s the journey of going within, it’s looking back as well.”

“My dad never got to see this room,” he says, looking around, “and he never got to hear the album, but it’s all in honour and dedication. I’ve got a track called ‘Watching Over (Bless Up Dad)’, and I believe that he’s seeing it, and he’s empowering me.

My family did the work for me to be able to be here sitting in this room. The album is Intra-I, but ‘I’ doesn’t mean just myself. For me, it’s in the Rastafarian sense: ‘I and I’ is ‘we’. I think we’re not here alone; this isn’t just about me. It’s about the people that have come before me, so multiple ‘I’s. It’s a journey of community.”

CROSSTOWW N CONCERTS

W

P R E S E N T S

MONDAY 14 MARCH

ROUNDHOUSE . LONDON

TUESDAY 15 MARCH

ALBERT HALL . MANCHESTER

WEDNESDAY 16 MARCH

BARROWLAND . GLASGOW THURSDAY 17 MARCH

ROCK CITY . NOTTINGHAM

FRIDAY 18 MARCH

O2 GUILDHALL . SOUTHAMPTON

EELSTHEBAND.COM

A CROSSSTOWN CONCERTS & FRIENDS PRESENTATION

BY ARRANGEMENT WITH ITB

The Umlauts An art punk troupe who are resisting dystopia, by Dominic Haley.

Photography by Gem Harris

“‘Tight and comfy.’ That’s what we’re going for,” Oliver Offord declares out of the blue. As if to force home his point, he’s pointing his finger straight at me. Taken aback by the sudden non sequitur, I glance quizzically at the three other people gathered around the log that’s functioning as a makeshift conference table, deep inside the Wiltshire countryside.

Vocalist Annabelle Mödlinger smiles helpfully and puts me back in the picture. “Our first group trip was to a mountain near my hometown. As part of it, I hired this ski instructor, and let’s just say he was the most Austrian bloke in the entire world.

His catchphrase for the trip was, ‘You need your boots to be tight and comfy.’”

“We were crap!” says Alfred Lear, almost apologetically.

“All I remember was having to do that snowplough thing all the way down the mountain. From a distance, it must’ve looked very sad and very slow. Still, it was a good leg workout.”

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It’s a confusing moment, but it’s a great window into the group dynamics that drive The Umlauts. On stage, the band might appear to be be a rotating cast of players – a weirdlydressed crowd, looking faintly like a GCSE music class in full swing – but at the core is the four people who’ve joined me here, next to this ship that’s marooned in the middle of a forest at End of The Road festival.

Joking around and finishing each other’s sentences, The Umlauts come across like four friends at a festival, and it’s actually hard to believe that their individual backgrounds read like a location list for a James Bond movie. Mödlinger hails from the Austrian Alps, while Maria Vittoria Faldini, her fellow vocalist, calls Monaco home. In almost total contrast, Offord and Lear’s roots stem from the sleepy Gloucestershire market town of Stroud, and it could be said that the earliest iteration of The Umlauts started there. Holed up in the town’s SVA arts space,

this formative period might not have resulted in anything tangible but sparked a fascination with synthesisers, the DNA of the group’s sound.

It took a move to London and several hazy jam sessions over a kitchen table in Peckham for something that could be recognised as The Umlauts began to coalesce. “We were lucky that we had very appeasing neighbours,” shrugs Lear, recounting those early sessions in their student flat. “Me and Alf were making a lot of recordings as part of a project we were doing.

Actually, I think ‘project’ makes it sound like we’d thought it through – we hadn’t. It was almost like comedy; we were just making stuff up. I’m not really sure how it happened; we got a bit drunk, but we realised that we actually had something that sounded good, and it was then that we both decided ‘let’s make it into a proper song.’”

The group’s sound crystallised further when the duo met Mödlinger and Faldini at Wimbledon Arts College. Adding international styles and perspectives into the equation, their vocals switch effortlessly between German, English, French and Italian, bringing a level of detached surrealism to the band’s output.

“It was very spontaneous,” says Faldini, recalling the band’s first practice as a four-piece. “Words were already a big part of our practice, and getting those things into the music came quite naturally. It didn’t seem strange or unknown at all.”

The result of these sessions is the band’s debut EP, Ü.

Recorded at Margate’s PRAH studios and released in June on the very same label, it’s a tightly hewn mix of mechanical synth-pop, spiky no wave and bristling post-punk. The six songs show off a band able to juggle contradictions with ease, recalling both the disorientating melodies of first-generation post-punk bands like X-Ray Spex and Cabaret Voltaire yet retaining enough in the way of structure and pop sensibility to keep things dancefloor-friendly.

“We appreciate all kinds of music,” explains Lear when I ask about the band’s influences. “I don’t think we’ve ever tried to pinpoint the influences because they don’t always come from music. If you had to press me, I think bands like The Fall, even though it doesn’t seem that clear that they’re in there. We’re all big fans of Björk, and we all love The Knife...”

“There’s also been a lot of German music,” adds Mödlinger with a knowing smile. “We definitely bonded over a lot of Can, Malaria and Kluster back when we were first jamming. I think you could definitely say that it’s had an influence.”

— Boiler Suits and Combat Boots— One thing that becomes quickly apparent is how much The Umlauts are a collaborative effort. Each song has been treated almost like a conversation between each band member, and it gives their tracks a strange aura of artistic tension.

Listening through the EP is like tuning into a podcast series. The band tackle a subject through duelling synths, metaphors and deadpan lyricism in the same way a group tutorial might discuss their way through a topic – unpacking the concepts, analysing the themes and hopefully arriving at a conclusion.

The process is most apparent on the band’s first single, ‘Boiler Suits and Combat Boots’. Sounding like a combination of

Kraftwerk and The Human League and sporting a cover that is pure Tangerine Dream, you’d be forgiven for taking it as a wellmeaning pastiche. But dig into the lyrics a bit, and it’s actually doing something pretty clever. The harsh, mechanical rhythms and hypnotically repeating synth lines are, in fact, merely set dressing for a darkly humorous takedown of conformity. It’s a track that the band describe as a vision of a world lost in ‘dystopian uniformity’.

When I ask about the background to the song, Mödlinger starts out dismissively. “It was almost like, let’s do a Kraftwerk piss-take. The boys already had the title, so I wrote the song at our practice. Basically, I blurted out whatever lyrics came into my mind at the time.”

“I guess it’s kind of about thinking about the world around us,” she continues, digging a little deeper. “I wanted to ask the question why we all wear our uniforms, because we all do. I find it weird how we all fear this creeping monoculture yet play a part in creating it. We all went to art school, but we’re just as guilty as anyone else. The art world likes to think of itself as somehow outside of society, but it’s just another segment in a way. Whoever you are, we all follow trends.”

‘Energy Plan for the Western Man’, the band’s follow-up, similarly explores dystopian concepts through synthetic texture and monotone vocals. Its title is from a work by German performance art pioneer Joseph Beuys; the original aspired to provoke an open and honest discussion between artist and audience. The Umlauts, though, have deliberately inverted the meaning. “I remember being more struck by the title,” Mödlinger tells me.

“It made me think about Western men in general and how, as a society, we’ve created a group of people who lack empathy.”

— Hogs and grapes — Many acts would be taking it easy with two well-received singles and an EP doing the rounds, but The Umlauts seem like they’re itching to change things up. A summer’s worth of festival appearances and club shows seem to have left the group brimming with confidence and sporting the potential energy of an elastic band, with the four creative members poised and ready to travel in all sorts of strange and unusual directions.

Faldini, especially, seems hyped at the prospect of tipping yet more ingredients to the brew. “I’m really keen to start bringing disco and Italian pop into the mix. It’s fun to play around with and merge all these worlds together. It gives us a much more open canvas to play with, and, like, a lot more space to play around with, both emotionally and musically.”

“We’re spending a bit more time planning what we want to do, and that can only be a good thing,” adds Lear. The last record was made under all this uncertainty, and our only real ambition was making something that would work, so this second record should be about flexing. I want to test out the boundaries and see what we can really do.”

“The next record is definitely going to be a lot different,” nods Offer in agreement. “This next one is going to be properly hedonistic; it’ll be like finding a huge table covered in hogs, grapes and all sorts of delicious things.”

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Reviews

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Albums

Courtney Barnett — Things Take Time, Take Time (marathon) Courtney Barnett has always leaned into the more contemplative end of the stereotypical slacker rock continuum. Usually typified by toothy grins and a deadpan gaze, her tentatively-titled debut album Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit was a pokerfaced breakthrough, revelling in the surreal minutiae of a good pub anecdote, moulding the liminal space between myth and reality into short story technicolour, where details become exaggerated and characters more outlandish than the time it was told before. It’s a guessing game as to which came first: these bewitchingly made-up truths and dreamlike philosophising delivered with a razor blade’s sharpness, or her incisive wordplay, worthy of a new book of proverbs on anxiety and existential dread.

Three years later and her second album was an open letter to those that branded her the new, queer, feminist hope for alternative music. Tell Me How You Really Feel was a cutting challenge to the Hole and Courtney Barnett comparisons that had come so easily earlier in her career. While the aesthetics stayed the same on a cheap listen, the small details venerated in her storytelling once upon a time were redacted line by line.

Fantastical narratives were traded in for Nirvana puns, and voyeuristic satire swapped for paraphrasing Margaret Atwood. But there was a power within the cast-off nuance, where Barnett was acutely aware of her own talents even while advising the listener not to be: “I could eat a bowl of alphabet soup and spit out better words than you.”

If you worried about the lack of tragicomic edge to Tell Me How You

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Really Feel, Barnett’s new album loses it completely. Third time out, Things Take Time, Take Time is Barnett embracing a hitherto unfamiliar level of tenderness, still keen-eyed and quick-witted, but freed from the intimidating foam finger in the audience pointing to her with the word “funny!” in big, bold, peeling letters. It’s a strange shackle to be held by, but her whole no-punchlines tip takes some adjusting to. Soundbiteready insults may not be the reason behind repeat listening, but they’re a nice embellishment on her previous work; there’s still a part of pressing play on a Courtney Barnett album that feels chained to a laugh. When she writes about love, you expect to hear of an irrational hatred too. When she writes down her congratulations, you expect her to break the fourth wall and tell us the person’s actually a prick.

Recorded between Melbourne and Sydney in late 2020 and early 2021 with Warpaint drummer – and producer in her own right – Stella Mozgawa, the record’s narrative somewhat unavoidably seeps into our different experiences of lockdown. What global uncertainties unsettled for some offered others a moment to recalibrate, and an overwhelming feeling of false security – or, at least, resoluteness – permeates Things Take Time, Take Time. Album opener ‘Rae Street’ switches Barnett’s signature flaneurism for voyeurism. Where stories of the street were comically captured in person before, her vignettes are now taken from a seat by the window, aimlessly and morosely filling the time between day and night. Punchlines are swapped for poetry; tiptoeing garbage trucks and isolated rituals are observed with a plaintive curiosity, drawing out their strange beauties and contradictions without judgement. “You seem so stable but you’re just hangin’ on,” she offers at the song’s end, which seems to turn its thoughts inwards as much as it is projected elsewhere.

Mozgawa’s production gives and takes throughout the album, offering some of Barnett’s most and least interesting sonic ventures to date. ‘Turning

Green’ and album closer ‘Oh The Night’ are occasionally pared back to an isolated drum machine taken from Wilco’s The Loft studio two years ago. The former is crying out for a ‘Nudge It’-style “gimme gimme” from Sleaford Mods – or any injection of life – rather than a vocal that performatively drains the song’s metronomic energy further. It’s a visceral burnout, despite reflecting some of the album’s most nuanced lyricism on finding beauty within mundanity: “The trees are turning green / And this springtime lethargy / Is kind of forcing you to see / Flowers in the weeds.” There’s little distinction to be made between the garbage and the flowers, to evoke Leonard Cohen, but it is primordially effective; it has the feeling of listening to a song that’s on its last legs, plugged into life support.

Conversely, ‘Take It Day By Day’ leaps into a DIY-fuelled Nirvana-via-Riot Grrrl swarm, with a new wave undertone that suggests Blondie on a disco extraction. The same by-numbers sprawl that drags Barnett down moments before is defibrillated, emboldened, tracing the song’s rhythm one syllable at a time, finding the instrument in her unmistakable Melbourne twang, and laying it over a bassline that – hear me out – sounds straight out of Grease. It’s a welcome resuscitation; a mantra on living in the downside of the curve: “Take it day by day / You’ve gotta put one foot in front of the other.” More importantly, Barnett’s spark is bright, deliberately spacing out her platitudes until the sentiments switch from encouragement to derision: “Don’t give up just yet / Maybe tomorrow / Could be time well spent.”

It’s a bold dash of colourful graffiti on a monolithic, monotone high-rise, a clown’s smile in the middle of a library, the feature wall of a beige room. Things Take Time, Take Time is Barnett’s most personal, vulnerable, joyful, and liberated work in one. Still, she sounds more bored, her subjects more commonplace, her life less eventful. The daze she writes about in ‘Sunfair Sundown’ isn’t a sonic switch-up like Kurt Vile’s Wakin’... – it’s brought on by seeing the potential

Albums of her friends’ property renovations on Zoom, and the fact that they’ve built a table. She’s still laconically sharp, profound with found objects and master of inversions like a Jonathan Richman and Breeders hybrid, but there’s the introduction of a poignant sidenote in her writing: namely that, after all these laissez-fairisms, jokes and sarcastic tumbles, you are still the centre.

The underlying, understated context of Things Take Time, Take Time – and the key to the identity of that vital “you” – is Barnett’s breakup with long-time partner Jen Cloher.

Their relationship has been musically back-and-forthed a few times until now, with Cloher admitting in her 2017 selftitled album that she struggles with long distance, and painting in the silences between texts: “You’ve been gone so long you could have been dead”. Barnett’s response, four years on, is tender:“If I don’t hear from you tonight / I know you’ve probably closed your eyes / And everything will be alright.” It’s a song of back-dated reassurances, that each morning she’d wake with her on her mind. As foreshadowing goes, it turns the album’s standout track ‘Splendour’ into a moment of genuine heartbreak, as the reality of their relationship ending sends Barnett’s droning cadence drifting into an unshakeable sadness: “Oh no / Oh no / Oh no / Oh no / Oh no I am really going to miss you.”

So here it is: Things Take Time, Take Time. The result of everybody not saying, “isn’t it about time that Courtney Barnett scraps all the talk about organic vegetables, house-hunting in a gloomy village, and makes a good old-fashioned record about falling in and out of love?”

And like all the best albums, its originality comes strangely packaged. It’s an exercise in having seen it all before, without knowing where you saw it; it’s a feat of having heard it all before without knowing what it sounded like. On a collection of songs largely free from any of Barnett’s signature quips, her presence is still enough to turn the scribbed notes of half an hour’s overthinking into a real page-turner. 7/10 Tristan Gatward

Grouper — Shade (kranky) There’s always been a remarkable stillness to Liz Harris’ work as Grouper, capable of disarming her listeners. Falling somewhere between ambient music, slowcore, folk and drone, her paradoxically sparse and cavernous songs occupy a distinctive space in the musical landscape of her native Pacific Northwest. The tranquillity of this music always feels temporary and fragile, yet somehow inescapable, featherlight guitars and keys thicker with import than physical or instrumental mass. One false move, and the whole thing could collapse; yet Harris rarely makes false moves.

Shade is the sound of Harris wondering whether she might deliberately begin to disturb that tranquillity. Many of the tracks here are over a decade old, yet the act of revisiting them and finally (re)presenting them publicly suggests a newfound questioning of her practice from Harris. Opener ‘Followed The Ocean’ announces itself with a burst of white noise, whose extremities shortly retreat into the background to make way for Harris’ layered, keening vocals, filtered to within an inch of their lives, as though heard through an off-tune radio in a faraway room. This contrasts sharply with ‘Unclean Mind’, whose Phil Elverum-like winding chords and wispy melody feel remarkably direct, shorn of either the noise of the previous track or the gloopy reverb of so much of Harris’ other work.

Many of the songs here feel like extended sketches or initial ideas, but that’s not a bad thing. There’s a spontaneity to Shade that makes its author feel a little more human than she might have in the past: ‘The Way Her Hair Falls’ muses slightly aimlessly, in a manner befitting

the title; on ‘Promise’, the loudest thing in the mix is the scrape of Harris’ fingers changing chords, her vocals draped over her arpeggios like a jacket over a chair.

Frequently, it feels like you’re sitting right next to Harris as she works through the production of Shade.

The pristine gloom of Grouper is still here in places, but it’s tested on this new record. Harris has never been a static artist, but this capacity for self-questioning feels healthy and well-timed, and she still writes a despondent vocal hook better than almost anyone. Shade feels like a transitional work, not unlike a far more understated counterpart to Low’s Double Negative. If that’s the direction she’s going, that’s very good news indeed.

8/10 Luke Cartledge

Anz — All Hours (ninja tune) The basis for our days being sub-divided into 24 separate blocks stretches back to Ancient Egypt. To keep track of the hours, the Egyptians used shadow clocks during the day, and at night used a star table to navigate the ‘decans’, the name for a group of 36 small constellations.

Life has moved on and while shadow clocks and decans are undeniably great, Manchester-based DJ and producer supreme Anz has a new way to help tell the time that’s less star tables, more turntables. Across six tracks, Anz’s ambitious EP All Hours attempts to map what an all-day dance soundtrack would sound like, using a cosmos of sounds from the UK dance scene to help detail its sky map.

The transit of sound starts ebulliently. ‘You Could Be’ is a deluge of sunny pop synths packaged in a balanced breakfast of R&B and electro sounds. ‘Real

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Albums Enough To Feel Good’ is laid-back, with a slow-tempo house beat nestling up against a calming drum track. It sounds like what I imagine taking a full lunchhour feels like.

As night approaches, the tempo switches up. ‘Inna Circle’ is a shower of dub-drunk blasts of slick hedonism, with rampant synths colliding against kapow-ing garage beats. ‘Last Before Lights’ brings the night to a close with an over-stimulated banger fueled by all that transpired in the day. Pensive but pounding.

Closer to 24 minutes than 24 hours, All Hours is a buoyant constellational chart for sunrisers and sundowners alike. Handy for when the shadow clock is busted. 7/10 Robert Davidson

Ross from Friends — Tread (brainfeeder) In late 2016, freshfaced bedroom producer Felix Clary Weatherall uploaded a new track to Bandcamp under his playful pseudonym Ross from Friends. Entitled ‘Talk to Me You’ll Understand’, the gorgeous, melancholic song quickly became a launch pad for the Essex-born artist and a phenomenon among the lo-fi house scene that was peaking during that era.

Several years on and it’s easy to miss those simpler times and the songs that soundtracked them, but Weatherall refuses to be defined by the past. Since then, the producer has signed to Flying Lotus’ record label and started building a discography that proves his ability to stretch the electronic genre into exciting new shapes and textures, far beyond those of his early days.

Now sharing his hotly anticipated second studio LP Tread with the world,

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Weatherall’s diverse palette echoes everyone from Burial to Bicep and Boards of Canada. When composing these 12 new tracks, his jam-heavy nature was aided by using his homemade software Thresho, which begins recording when the audio reaches a “user-defined threshold”, automatically timestamping and archiving his work and eliminating the usual frictions of recording in the process.

With this extra room to experiment, the record feels expansive and provides plenty of moments that feel ripe for dropping into his kinetic live sets. Tracks such as opener ‘The Daisy’ (named after one of the first steps in solving the Rubik’s Cube), ‘Love Divide’ and ‘XXX Olypiad’ offer an addictive taste of bittersweet club nostalgia, suited for both moving the dancefloor or more personal headphone sessions.

Inhabiting the chilled, hazy region between late nights and early mornings, Tread finds Ross from Friends at his most reflective, yet it’s his growing individuality and confidence that makes it one of the most re-playable electronic LPs this end of 2021. 8/10 Woody Delaney

Hayden Thorpe — Moondust For My Diamond (domino) It’s stating the obvious, but Hayden Thorpe is a bloody good musician, isn’t he? Seconds after hearing those spotless synths and his reassuring falsetto on Moondust For My Diamond, you know you’re in safe hands.

True to form, his second solo album postWild Beasts has a workmanlike approach.

It effortlessly satisfies with tactile production, charming melodic turns of phrase, and hooks that gently linger long after you’ve listened.

That comforting tone is matched

in the record’s approach to its central themes of cosmic mystery and spiritual awakenings. “What does it all mean?”

Thorpe asks, perfectly content to bask in the nice sounds rather than looking for a concrete answer. His polite and sophisticated approach to dance grooves on tracks like ‘Parallel Kingdom’ and ‘Golden Ratio’ knowingly borders on New Age cheese, but like the existential questions that Thorpe sings of, it’s safer to relax into the wondrous atmosphere than to think about the specifics too hard.

The record barely operates above a simmer. Its pristine approach to electronica implies “everything in its right place” without the accompanying dread of organised chaos. It’s just…organised.

Given it deals with a topic as big as, um, the meaning of everything, those who find cosmic questions more terrifying than enjoyably mystifying might wish for a bit more musical tension, but that’s not where Thorpe is. Moondust omits all the suffering and cruelty in the universe, in favour of aphorisms like “The universe is always right” and “The fantasy’s real, don’t believe in ‘not’”. His skill as a songwriter is enough to carry us through this pleasant journey, but you might still be left wondering what the point of it all is. 6/10 Skye Butchard

New Age Doom — Lee “Scratch” Perry’s Guide To The Universe (we are busy bodies) There have been many moving, eloquent tributes to the visionary that that was Lee “Scratch” Perry since his passing in August, written by people who knew him and his genius far more intimately than this writer could even begin to pretend to. So I’ll leave that to those people. Suffice to say that as one

Albums of Perry’s final projects, this collaboration with Canadian experimentalists New Age Doom – whose excellent, transporting album Himalayan Dream Techno was an under-the-radar smash last year – is a testament to the boundless creativity and restlessness of the great man. Combining vast sheets of bass and drone with the kinds of tape echo and plate reverb that haunt so much of the music that Perry made, inspired or subverted, each track here is a loping, seething juggernaut, over which Perry’s voice is given ample room to preach, incant, command and conduct.

Hints of drone metal and free jazz burn at the edges of the record, the spectral gust of dub turned inside out to maximalist ends. 12-minute closer ‘Conquer The Sin’ is a macro-microcosm of the record at large, its bassy underbelly pulling at the leash of its prog guitar line beautifully as Perry’s vocals pirouette high above.

Astonishing stuff – RIP to a real one.

9/10 Luke Cartledge

Klein — Harmattan (pentatone) Klein makes music that feels barely there one moment and suffocating the next.

Her desolate and remarkable sound collages operate in a dreamlike space that threatens to become a nightmare from moment to moment. On records like Lifetime and Frozen, she grounded her work with field-recorded snippets of conversation that conjure a strong sense of place – an emotional connection for the listener to hold onto.

With Harmattan, the South London experimental composer offers no such grounding. The record is intentionally oblique in its approach to classical, jazz and drone. The few vocals, such as Charlotte Church’s warped singing on

‘Made for Ibadan’, are as spectral as the sounds around them. Named after the dry West African season, Harmattan can sometimes feel stifling and alien to those unfamiliar. But there’s a fluidity and depth that makes it no less exciting than what has come before.

‘The Haunting of Grace’ is a desolate ambient piece that eventually blooms wide. A stray harmonica morphs the track into a futuristic folk lamentation.

The following ‘Ray’ masters that “barely there” feeling, inducing a state of panic each time a wash of smothering noise rises up in the mix. And then there’s ‘Hope Dealers’, a heartfelt tribute to grime and Channel AKA that communicates a lifelong passion with blaring organs and a slow-motion piano melody.

Harmattan zeroes in on tone and feeling to captivate, and even when you’re not quite sure what the feeling is, it’s no less felt. Its opening tracks ‘For Solo Piano’ and ‘Roc’ are the most standoffish moments, daring the listener to find a beating heart behind jarring chords and breathy horns. After the record’s hypnotic loop has taken hold, hidden depths reveal themselves as the dust begins to clear – or we get used to the stifling air quality. 7/10 Skye Butchard

Damon Albarn — The Nearer the Mountain, More Pure the Stream Flows (transgressive) It’s been said by fiercer critics than this one that Damon Albarn is the sort of songwriter you can’t trust because his best songs are ballads, the implication being that beguiling heartstring-tuggers like ‘This Is A Low’ are merely sugary distractions from the harsh truths of the real world. And if there’s a kernel of truth in

that analysis, The Nearer The Mountain has it writ large: at first glance, Albarn’s second solo record is a feature-length exercise in balladeering, some of it haunting, some wistful, some melancholic, and all wonderfully and wilfully escapist.

Bluntly, Albarn haters should steer clear.

Given the record’s origins, though, and on closer inspection, perhaps the album’s prevailing mood is fair enough: originally written as an orchestral piece inspired by the landscapes of Iceland, then transformed into a song-cycle during the pandemic, the album’s tone – reflective, lush, wide-eyed – succeeds, rather beautifully at its best, in evoking the wonder and romanticism of the natural world, becoming a welcome transport away from the grimness of the UK in 2021. Twin instrumental experiments – ‘Combustion’’s first minute coming on like a developing-world traffic jam made from honking brass and scraped strings, and the restless minimalism of ‘Esja’ – provide welcome structure, and in ‘Royal Morning Blue’ (the only non-ballad here) lurks one of Albarn’s best songs in years, all Scott Walker croon and synth-pop undertones, the kind that only Albarn seems capable of writing. Moments of soppiness elsewhere occasionally seep into meandering mawk, but if you’re on Albarn’s side, there’s plenty here to love.

6/10 Sam Walton

Deerhoof — Actually, You Can (joyful noise) Actually, You Can is Deerhoof ’s third record released in little more than a year. In the band’s own words, it’s their “Baroque-gone-DIY” album, and it takes Satomi Matsuzaki, Ed Rodriguez, John Dieterich, and Greg Saunier’s ability to create over-the-top pastiches, mixing

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Albums different and colliding bits of popular and high culture, to the highest point. They try interpolating “a Handel aria, a Maya Angelou essay, and a Catholic homily in which Christ descends into inferno to release its captive souls”, as in the opening ‘Be Unbarred, O Ye Gates of Hell’; on ‘Scarcity is Manufactured’, they pay homage to the late Ritchie Valens with a rendition of ‘La Bamba’ that’s turned into a Mexican pride anthem by guitarist Ed Rodriguez. Throughout the nine tracks of the LP, heavy drumming and distorted guitars play incessantly, creating a cloud of sound over Matsuzaki’s ethereal voice in what they call, again in their inimitable style, “rococo garage”, which must be the best definition of their sound so far. With Actually, You Can, Deerhoof confirm their masterful ability to create new worlds, both sonic and verbal.

7/10 Guia Cortassa

Swindle — THE NEW WORLD (bmg) Community has always been a big part of Swindle’s work. From Nubya Garcia to D Double E, many of London’s finest have rolled into the studio with him to realise his vision. With his latest album THE NEW WORLD, collaboration is still the name of the game.

The presence of Maverick Sabre may or may not be a good thing, depending on your stance on his particular brand of soul-rap crooning. ‘Second Guess’ feels like it could be a funky jam, were Swindle to have picked anyone else to guest vocal.

But the rest of the star-studded line-up bring their best to the party. ‘Darkest Hour’, featuring Poppy Ajudha’s beautiful tones capturing an emergence from troubled times into the light, is a particular highlight.

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Greentea Peng’s appearance on ‘What More’ brings all of the laidback Lauryn Hill cool that her debut Man Made delivered. Meanwhile, frequent collaborators Knucks, Ghetts and Kojey Radical join Akala on the propulsive ‘Blow Ya Trumpet’, which throws a brooding grime beat against bright brassy horns that feel like they belong more in a ’70s kung-fu film.

It’s clear that Swindle loves throwing together every aspect of his musical education together and seeing what sticks. The grit of pirate radio. The collaboration of his time on Brownswood.

There’s a feeling of liberation throughout THE NEW WORLD, not just in the themes of race, grief and community, but in his sound. This is what makes Swindle such an exciting producer. Capable of balancing these sounds, a cast of friends and heavy topics with a deft touch. It might not be as rich a feast as his previous record No More Normal, but it’s still a vibrant smörgåsbord worth tucking in to.

7/10 Chris Taylor

Aya — im hole (hyperdub) On debut album im hole, Aya (fka loft), surely one of the most captivating electronic producers to emerge from the UK scene in recent years, continues her boundless exploration of club-tuned sound design, while developing her presence as vocalist. The project stands as a singular work, imbuing themes of internal doubt and external pressure, questioning ideas of sexuality, gender and identity. It’s the marrying of Aya’s increased vocal presence, and her unrivalled approach to sound construction that navigates these thematic threads in idiosyncratic ways, neither wearing through obviousness, or

alienating though opaqueness. There’s no wonder the album’s lyrics have been released as a book of poetry – new meanings are sure to be exposed in print.

But it is the symbiosis of sound and voice where the record’s unique perspective is most captivating; the broken, drunken beat of ‘once wen’t west’ where time stretches like taffy, the layered, pitched vocal following suit obediently. The line between poetry, voice and instrumentation is blurred with simultaneously reckless glee and knowing calculation.

The instrumental tracks reinforce the atmosphere of the record. The grimeadjacent charm of ‘dis yacky’ which ends up sounding something like an early Big Apple Records release, or the gorgeously harmonic plucks of ‘the only solution i have found is to simply jump higher’ that occasionally flirts with gurning acid lines, before altogether detuning itself to jarring effect.

Elsewhere, ’tailwind’, with it’s subsonic force and anarchic take on club trope sounds, feels like Minor Science at his most unhinged, and the wrestling between ambient beauty and sound art menace on ‘If [redacted] Thinks He’s Having This As A Remix He Can Frankly Do One’ is a gorgeous breather. This is a sonically rich album that confirms Aya’s place at the forefront of cutting edge electronic music and promises a future filled with left-turns and intrigue.

8/10 Oskar Jeff

La Luz — La Luz (hardly art) Selftitling an album always feels like a weird move from a band well into the throes of their career. Often the praxis of artists bolstered by a bit of arrogance or a

Albums marketing team trying to put a fledgling rockstar back on the map, it seems strange that self-effacing surf-rock trio La Luz would opt for an eponymous title for their fourth studio album.

But, rather than an ego-stroking exercise, La Luz’s appellation is a testament to the emotional and musical affinity that runs deep below the band’s surface. And it’s this affinity that has allowed them to concoct their most intimate work yet. Languid in its composition and more visceral than ever in its lyricism, La Luz’s shimmering, mellow atmosphere feels very much like a sleepy morning waking up next to an old lover, or a Sunday morning walk through the park with a new one.

Lethargic, velvety ballads like ‘Lazy Eyes and Dune’ and ‘Oh, Blue’ – the latter of which is underpinned by a slackened and slowed down version of the trio’s usual sunny ‘doo-wops’ that feels a little bit like picking up a vinyl record and putting it on the turntable at the wrong speed – are sprawling, private pastiches of the inner workings of songwriter Shana Cleveland’s brain. Other moments are more straightforward: the twinkly instrumentals on rose-tinted track ‘Here on Earth’ and the jangling vintage pop rhythms of ‘I Won’t Hesitate’ flutter like elemental love songs.

Meanwhile, the album’s slightly more percussive flashs amp up the psychedelia. ‘Metal Man’ is a feverish symphony of convulsive reverb, ascending drum beats and swirling synths that knot themselves together like a tangle of bindweed in an untended garden, while the soft and lackadaisical ‘Watching Cartoons’ toys with carefully woven, lush harmonies that drift over dozy jazz-infused psych rhythms, with the occasional twangy guitar riff serving as a veiled reminder of the band’s surfier roots.

In many ways this new record feels like a subtle departure from the trio’s token brand of summery surf-noir.

Beachy riffs are displaced by spectral synths and fuzzy, lo-fi production values hijacked by traipsing, catatonic instrumentals that feel like a far cry from the pool-party-chic carved out on Weirdo

Shrine and Floating Features. But for all its stylistic digressions, La Luz – with its lyrical intricacies and syrupy sound – feels, perhaps, like the most authentic representation of this band yet. 7/10 Charlotte Marston

Self Esteem — Prioritise Pleasure (fiction) Indie-pop veteran Rebecca Taylor embodies the role of a pop star with joy and confidence. She nails the technical elements, of course: the larger-thanlife persona, the earworm choruses, the vocal excellence – it’s all there. But what makes her truly special is her ability to take us all with her, centring the listener in each glorious ‘fuck you’ to those who have wronged her, and in each vulnerable acknowledgement of pain. Taylor views her approach to pop as a Trojan Horse – a vehicle for poised and memorable feminist statements. Sure, it’s calculated, but it’s also raw and dangerous. Taylor’s shocking lyrical honesty goes beyond what most pop stars can offer.

Prioritise Pleasure is a frank, uplifting look at feminine survival in the midst of male violence and toxic social pressure, finding communal strength in timeless group vocals and ecstatic choruses. Early single ‘I Do This All the Time’ uses undecorated spoken word to reassure us (“Getting married isn’t the biggest days of your life / All the days that you get to have are big”), while ‘How Can I Help You’ opts instead for pummelling Yeezus-era drum hits. As a young drummer, Taylor was criticised by the men around her for the way her body moved on the kit – a grimly common experience for female percussionists.

Here, her drumming becomes confrontational under lines like “I’ll always be

wet, always be up for it / Politely sit, but I don’t know shit, do I? / And that’s how you live with it”.

Rather than using pop polish to mask uncomfortable truths, Prioritise Pleasure hits so powerfully specifically because it uses the language of a pop record to state them frankly. It’s masterful. 8/10 Skye Butchard

Vanishing Twin — Ookii Gekkou (fire) Vanishing Twin are one of the better acts to emerge from the ironically dull psychedelic revival of the last decadeand-a-half. The brainchild of singer and guitarist Cathy Lucas, on their two albums to date, the London-based group have taken a more refined approach to the well-trodden ground of psych-pop than many of their peers.

Their new album, Ookii Gekkou – Japanese for ‘big moonlight’ – is nothing different. Over nine tracks the group tell stories from a lockdown-inspired world “where it’s always night”, reaching for a broad array of musical traditions – from afro-funk to cosmic jazz – to bolster their familiar grooves.

Things start fairly traditionally, however, with opener ‘Big Moonlight (Ookii Gekkou)’ and ‘Phase One Million’, the latter of which recalls fellow psych merchants Khruangbin’s vaguely international approach to songwriting. From there though, Vanishing Twin start to flex some more avant-garde muscle: ‘The Organism’ sounds like the score to an enjoyably cryptic ’60s art film, while ‘In Cucina’ is layered with polyrhythmic percussion and warped synths.

As the album enters its final third things switch up again, with almost an almost krautrock sense of pace underpin-

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Albums exchange and ending somewhere along the lines of a barbed Sun Ra melody, like a long-form auditory magic trick.

Are these highlights too long at 14 and 20 minutes respectively? Yes, but that’s precisely the kind of belligerent approach you want from Irreversible Entanglements; the audacity to make you shut up and listen, no matter how long it takes. 6/10 Dafydd Jenkins

ning ‘Tub Erupt’ while closing track ‘The Lift’ brings the album to a groove-heavy, synth-laden conclusion. 6/10 Mike Vinti

Juls — Sounds of My World (the orchard) Over the last decade, few have done more to help advance afrobeats and the diaspora of African music into the mainstream than Juls. Both a fierce advocate and wary guardian, he’s intentionally pushed the sounds of African pop and Soweto amapiano forward, but like any true producer, his gift lies in blending the music closest to his heart with an even bigger spectrum of sound. It’s an intentionality that makes Sounds of My World as autobiographical as its title suggests, Juls acting as the lightning rod bringing everything and everyone together, whether it’s in one of his effortlessly smooth DJ sets or a laidback session.

And that sense of communal creativity extends throughout the album with every track here co-powered by a cameo or collaboration. Nigerian rapper WizKid appears on ‘Close to Me’, Ghanaian singer King Promise lends his talents to ‘My Size’, and Kenyan afro-pop group Sauti Sol feature on ‘Mare’. From baile funk to reggae, dancehall to R&B, it’s the collective rhythm and energy of a continent made meditative and mellow on ‘Summer in the Ends’, bass heavy and restrained on ‘M.O.O.D’, percussive and acoustic on ‘Love Language’.

Whether he’s pulling music from Nigeria, Ghana, or Cape Verde, there’s pride and purpose, each track an education. As the album title suggests, this careful curation of divergent sounds is simply the way Juls hears and experiences the world. He just wants more of us to hear what he does. 7/10 Reef Younis

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Irreversible Entanglements — Open The Gates (don giovanni / international anthem) As a jazz troupe in the loosest sense, Irreversible Entanglements have always demanded connection on their own terms. Perhaps even more so than its predecessor, 2020’s Who Sent You?, their third album Open The Gates is a challenge – to the white-washing of jazz into clinical dinner party music, to the barbarism of colonial expansion, to the inherent biases of whoever might be listening.

I’m aware of my own free jazz biases as I listen. There’s a deep refusal of easy legibility in Camae Ayewa, aka Moor Mother’s, poetry, as she draws overlapping circles around birth, annihilation and empire, connecting dots where most see none. The furious chops of her surrounding bandmates don’t always pull into gear, occasionally sounding a little too hesitant either by accident or design. In fact, we’re often brought in medias res of the action, as if we’ve stumbled upon the rehearsal room right after we’ve missed an initial burst of energy. I came away from Open The Gates wishing I could’ve been there from the start, which speaks more to the limitation of the album format than any fault with the group itself.

But when you do get the full picture, it’s a sight to behold. ‘Keys to Creation’ channels the punk belligerence Irreversible Entanglements blend so well into a jazz setup, its bassline incrementally adjusting the groove in time with Ayewa’s invocations. There’s something Wire-like about it, a ticking pipe bomb stuck in countdown mode, even as the rhythm collapses into a murky dirge around the half-way mark. ‘Water Meditation’ follows a similar pattern, beginning with an intense trumpet and vocal

Hand Habits — Fun House (saddle creek) When the pandemic forced the world to stop, Meg Duffy find themselves for the first time in a long while without attachments, and ended up stopping to consider everything that happened in their relentless life over the last few years. This led the singer-songwriter, better known as Hand Habits, to start going to therapy, and the results of these moments of introspection became part of their creative process; new album Fun House is the sound of that process beginning to bear fruit.

Duffy lives with producer Sasami Ashworth (known for her Domino-signed, epoynmous solo project) on and musician Kyle Thomas, better known as King Tuff, and they convinced Duffy to record all the new material and entrust it to their housemates to be produced and engineered.

The record they made is Hand Habits’ most refined and complex album to date.

Keeping their signature Americana sound in the vocals, the arrangements of each track move away from all the country reminiscences of the previous albums and float towards a unique mix of different pop inspirations, perfectly evoking Los Angeles, where it was written. A serial collaborator, Duffy is joined by Perfume Genius’ Mike Hadreas for a couple of

Albums tracks in the album, including ‘Just to Hear You’, which has the potential and the polish to become an iconic duet. Confessional and cathartic at the same time, Fun House raises the bar for a singersongwriter whose calibre of talent and charisma was already very high indeed.

8/10 Guia Cortassa

Black Marble — Fast Idol (sacred bones) It’d be easy to reduce the music that New Yorker Chris Stewart makes as Black Marble to the simplicity of its formula: yearning, washed-out vocals, ticking drum machines, tinny synths and ever-so-tasteful guitar arpeggios. And while it’s true that there really isn’t much more to it than that in material terms, it feels like a plain list of this music’s basic elements sort of misses the point.

On paper, Fast Idol, the fourth Black Marble album and the second to be released on the reliably excellent Sacred Bones, doesn’t do a great deal that Stewart’s previous records haven’t done already. But it’s saved by the sheer quality of the writing here: every track bursts with melody, and Stewart’s vocal delivery, though heavily doused with reverb, always feels just intimate enough for us to latch onto and identify with; there’s none of the “I just use my voice as another texture” approach that can occasionally feel like a bit of a cop-out.

Tracks like ‘Somewhere’ and ‘Try’ have hooks that aren’t so much catchy as persistent: rather than grabbing your attention by virtue of their sheer size and audacity, they get under your skin almost imperceptibly, and once there don’t leave you alone. Much of Fast Idol does exactly this; a record that’s much more than the sum of its parts. 7/10 Luke Cartledge

Theon Cross — Intra-I (new soil) Redefining a genre, or embracing genrelessness, is becoming more and more frequent in modern music, with portmanteaus springing up like leaks. On Intra-I, Theon Cross throws multiple music rulebooks out the window. Part of the British jazz scene, he specialises in tuba, but on this record he combines the resonating bass of his instrument with Caribbean melodies, hip-hop beats and powerful rap. Intra-I is soulfully energising, carefully orchestrated electronic music that has inherited all the dominant genes of drum and bass, dub, and club, and those genes go handin-hand with field recordings, afrobeat and modern jazz.

Opening with a powerful call-toarms, ‘Intro’ reaches out to those caught up in the nets of capitalism and asks them to stand poised in the face of a new day and not to be beaten down. What follows is an album that explores identity and the journey of self-discovery. Shumba Maasi, Afronaut Zu, Ahnanse and Consensus act as the mouth pieces of Cross’ reflective narrative. ‘Roots’ commences Cross’ meditation. Saturated in satisfying bass, Maasi speaks to taking pure ownership over yourself. Fantastically buoyant melodies act as a joyous introduction to Ahnanse’s and Zu’s verses that describe the good and the bad of searching for yourself.

Transitioning from heavy electronica to purpose-driven percussion, ‘Trust the Journey’ includes field recordings, bringing the record back down to earth. Afrobeat and soca-inspired grooves growl whilst an ominous melody captures the curiosity and uncertainty of moving forward. A rapturous crescendo adds a tone of triumph; not one of finality

but one of acceptance. This connection to the primal finishes out the album, Cross and Oren Marshall combining tuba forces to create a melodic wall of earth-shattering sound.

Despite chronicling a journey of loss and introspection, Intra-I’s tight instrumentation shows no moments of insecurity. Cross taps into the unpredictability of life with each unique track musically shifting from the previous yet they are all part of one flowing narrative. On stumbling across Intra-I, jazz wouldn’t make it onto your list of genre-assigning adjectives. Theon Cross goes deeper than preconceptions by delivering a record that is truly personal and intricate. 8/10 Sophia McDonald

Sam Evian — Time to Melt (fat possum) Many of us have wished we could split the city and escape to the country at various points over the last 18 months, but inspired by temporarily leaving New York to record the predecessor to Time to Melt, Sam Owens (aka Sam Evian) made it permanent this time – and sounds lighter for it.

The result of decamping to the Catskills and sorting through a stack of instrumental demos recorded over the last two years, the album breezes between woozy melodies and soulfully psychedelic pop with Owens evoking Elliott Smith fronting Metronomy on ‘Lonely Days’, strutting through big, brassy ensembles on ‘Easy to Love’, and falling on the brighter side of Junior Boys on ‘Never Know’.

For the most part, it’s a blissful take, but Owens also lands the odd punch on police brutality and for-profit prison systems (‘Freezee Pops’) with a deftness

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Albums you don’t initially hear coming, particularly when it hits like the Zero 7 remix of N*E*R*D’s ‘Provider’.

Elsewhere, the free-flowing jazz of ‘Around it Goes’ and Theremin frequencies of ‘Sunshine’ don’t carry the same social weight, but still contribute to a stylish slipstream that makes Time to Melt a pretty elegant listen. 7/10 Reef Younis

Helado Negro — Far In (4AD) ​​Occasionally, a record comes along that perfectly embodies a particular feeling. Far In, the seventh album from Helado Negro, is the aural equivalent of a Sunday. Across the fifteen songs, Roberto Lange, the Floridaborn, Brooklyn-based songwriter behind the moniker, shifts between comforting dreamlike compositions to flashbacks of the party from the night before. A vibeheavy record, it’s extremely successful in making its audience feel welcome from its boundless warmth.

There are highlights aplenty on Helado Negro’s latest work. On a particularly lengthy tracklist, attention is maintained through Lange’s aptitude for striking a tonal balance from start to finish. Slumberous ruminations helped along by gorgeously textured rippling guitar and the honeyed vocal accompaniment of Kacy Hill on ‘Wake Up Tomorrow’ and the delicate treatment across ‘Aguas Frías’ are contrasted with the terrifically lush 1970s-like ‘Aureole’, which hears the artist sing in Spanish, and the infectiously vibrant ‘La Naranja’. In building Far In’s engrossing atmosphere, Lange steadily develops the arrangements, allowing ample time and space to lull the listener into this restorative record.

Here, the magic is in the small details; the prominence of cymbals employed

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across ‘Hometown Dream’, a captivating ebb and flow of synth on ‘Purple Tones’, and ‘Wind Conversations’’ quick guitar picking. These are the moments that percolate in the listener’s mind long after Often heralding, but ultimately surpassing, the artistry of Devendra Banhart in his vocal style and how he combines folk with cosmic pop motifs, Lange’s soundscapes also recall some of Toro y Moi’s earlier, chiller output. In all, Helado Negro has created a record that suits all settings and listening experiences. 7/10 Zara Hedderman

Emma Ruth Rundle — Engine of Hell (sargent house) Given that Portland artist Emma Ruth Rundle is best known for cavernous-sounding albums of shoegaze metal full of howl and feedback, it’s perhaps no surprise that much has been made of the sparse soundworld of her third album Engine of Hell, which finds Rundle’s voice surrounded by simple instrumentation more suited to sitting rooms than stadiums.

On the one hand, that framing is understandable: free of any electric guitars, bass or drums here, Rundle is supported by just plaintive piano, acoustic guitar and the occasional string section, leaving songs that feel aching and weightless, encouraging more hush than mosh. On the other, though, despite the change in presentation, there’s a sense that not much is different under the bonnet: the songwriting style is still set to “epic” (only two tracks here are under five minutes), and Rundle’s vocal delivery remains rich and adenoidal, ripe with the trademark stagey annunciation of emo rock-band lead singers.

When she interacts more sensi-

tively with her new surroundings, as on the first halves of ‘Dancing Man’ and ‘Razor’s Edge’, her stylistic change of tack feels inspired. Elsewhere, unfortunately, Engine of Hell feels more like an MTV Unplugged version of a unheard bigger album, with all the accompanying jarring internal contradictions of scale and sense of sonic amputation: the intimacy feels confected and performed rather than organic, and there’s the frequent impression of a singer straining at the leash, desperate to break free of newly muted confines. There’s no denying these songs are straight from Rundle’s heart; what they’re lacking, however, is a body. 5/10 Sam Walton

Snail Mail — Valentine (matador) Blending indie, rock and folk, Snail Mail’s sophomore album could fit right in with the ’90s alternative charts. Joining the likes of Phoebe Bridgers and King Princess, Snail Mail’s prowess in crafting a modern sound filled with classic themes makes Valentine feel simultaneously familiar and fresh.

Lindsey Jordan puts her sensitive life events to a crisp yet biting soundtrack, wearing a bruised heart on her sleeve.

Forlorn over a breakup and recovering from time in a rehabilitation centre, the saying “beyond her years” feels too clichéd to say. However, this Snail Mail record feels polished, exhibiting Jordan’s pure talent and casting her young age aside as a surprising afterthought.

Heavy with heartache but fuelled by light melodies, the gentle folk moments on Valentine carry the same melancholic feeling found throughout the record. Heartstring-pulling violins and delicate piano accompany breathy vocals

Albums and desperately lovesick lyrics like “I want to wake up early / Just to be awake / In the same world as you.”

On the more indie end of the spectrum, lo-fi filtered electric guitar and harmonies invigorate the album, adding a layer of ardent energy. Dampened bass ripples in the background of ‘Ben Franklin’ as gentle synths contend with the warped guitars and emotive lyrics where all parts end up victorious.

Ironically, on ‘Valentine’, Jordan sings “fuck bring remembered” yet Valentine stands out as a complex record, one which should bring her further into the spotlight. 8/10 Sophia McDonald

CID RIM — Songs of Vienna (luckyme) Always off-kilter and sometimes bewildering, Clemens Bacher aka CID RIM’s Songs of Vienna is a constantly shifting record. One minute it has the lo-fi noodlings of early Metronomy, as in the latter half of ‘Last Snow’; the next it combines maximalist melodies and bombastic rhythms with Bacher’s fragile, autotuned vocals, bringing to mind The Age of Adz-era Sufjan Stevens.

While it is fun to try and latch onto some of the more outré hooks, especially with ‘The Marrow’ that really spotlights the “industrial” in IDM, the record can trip over into early 2010s EDM. All headache-y sugar rushes and grating autotune, such as on ‘Purgatory’. ‘We Drums Two’, though quieter, feels like an off-cut from Bon Iver’s 22, A Million in that same way.

The album’s greatest successes arrive when it allows tracks breathe, rather than drowning them in glaringly bright synths. ‘Rain’ lets its synths roll gently alongside a gorgeous choral accompaniment, while both ‘Friday’ and

album closer ‘Blame’ slowly unfurl themselves into cosmic wonders rather than diving straight into the deep end.

Songs of Vienna feels like an album of two halves: one of restraint and one of excess. The maximalist excesses have their place, especially when the tracks are allowed to grow into those moments. But, across the album, there are cacophonous tracks that are the very definition of “too much”. That may be an accurate representation of Vienna, but it’s where Bacher issues restraint that the most joy is found; those moments on which he lets you explore the Austrian capital at your own leisure, rather than ferrying you directly to the fireworks. 6/10 Chris Taylor

Makaya McCraven — Deciphering The Message (Blue Note) Fresh from reworking Gil Scott-Heron’s final album last year, I’m New Here becoming We’re New Again, Chicago drummer and producer Makaya McCraven makes his debut for Blue Note Records with another reimagining, this time taking on the legendary jazz label’s iconic back catalogue.

Picking out 13 tracks from the Blue Note vaults, McCraven and a host of collaborators breathe new life into 80-plus years of jazz history, honouring the original numbers while making them distinctly his own. Opening cut ‘A Slice of the Top’, originally by Hank Mobley, swings and rumbles with a distinctly post-Dilla lilt, all wonky brass and stumbling bass, while tracks like the classic ‘Autumn in New York’ and ‘C.F.D’ glide blissfully along bolstered by newly crisp production.

As with McCraven’s original work, the real magic on Deciphering The

Message is his ability to fuse sampling and live musicianship. Where previous reworkings of the Blue Note catalogue – most notably by McCraven’s fellow beat conductor Madlib’s Shades of Blue – have used it as source material for new production, McCraven opts to keep things more intact. Featuring both newly recorded elements and original tracks, all stitched together into new arrangements by McCraven, the album is a balancing act between production tricks and jazz chops.

Closing track ‘Black Rhythm Happening’ is the prime example, spilling out of the listener’s headphones with both the warmth of a live jazz band and the energy of a DJ playing to a particularly lively block party. All told, Deciphering The Message is a subtle update to the jazz tradition of artists recording new visions of their peer’s songs, and a fitting introduction for McCraven into the canon of Blue Note greats. 8/10 Mike Vinti

Hana Vu — Public Storage (ghostly international) Developing in the LA DIY scene, Hana Vu’s bedroom pop has always suggested there’s something grander to come. On her 2018 EP, Crying on the Subway, and its follow-up, Nicole Kidman/Anne Hathaway, Vu has continued to explore her sound. And while that self-production has been more solid than expansive, it’s incredibly impressive for an artist who was still at the tail end of her teens at the time.

But with a world-weariness that belies her years, and a contralto voice that simultaneously adds depth and distance, those early EPs left plenty of room to grow. Here, on Public Storage, Vu absolutely blooms.

Opener ‘April Fool’ leads in softly

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Albums with sparse piano and a pleading, spotlighted vocal. On the title track, that sad voice evolves into something more confident and assertive, cutting free without entirely cutting loose – a song destined for a world of cinematic, rain-soaked soundtracks. Vu then finds her power pop vocal on the guitar-driven, orchestral pomp of ‘Gutter’, shifts gears on the angsty disco of ‘Aubade’, and also makes ‘Everybody’s Birthday’ sound as aloof and glamorous as a Beverly Hills party you weren’t invited to.

Inspired by public storage units her family would use every few years as they moved, Vu calls the music here “very invasive and intense”. She also talks about imagining a desolate character, “crying out to an ultimately punitive force for something more”, and that brooding sense of discovery takes Public Storage to places of introspective rumination that’s dreamy and soulful, but also searching.

It’s a lyricism crystalized on the banjo twang and mellow builds of album closer ‘Maker’ where Vu asks some greater unknown power: “Can you make me anybody else?” She might not have that answer, but Public Storage is still a dream of a full debut. 8/10 Reef Younis

Parquet Courts — Sympathy For Life (rough trade) Historically, musicians have been known to sympathise with satanic entities, punk quartet Parquet Courts, however, have, as their seventh album suggests, a Sympathy For Life. Andrew Savage and his bandmates remind us that a lot has changed in the world since we heard from them on 2018’s Wide Awake!. One such shift is the band’s sound.

In the lead up to the recording

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sessions, produced by John Parish and Rodaidh McDonald, co-vocalist Austin Brown revealed that the group were enjoying letting loose at dance parties pre-pandemic. That sense of revelry is encapsulated on this record through electronically focused arrangements, new terrain for the band who have always tried to sound like a CBGB act. Aptly, then, Remain In Light-era Talking Heads appear to have been an integral source of inspiration as Parquet Courts found their feet in this new groovier direction. Their masquerading as David Byrne is proudly worn on ‘Plant Life’, which hears an infectious coupling of afrobeat percussion and groove-heavy bass riffs as a backdrop for near inherent incantations. Similarly, ‘Marathon of Anger’ bears a striking resemblance to Byrne’s vocal style.

In the midst of dancier instrumentation and krautrock-tinged tracks (‘Application Apparatus’), Parquet Courts proffer their old reliable scuzzy guitar tones (‘Homo Sapien’) and instantly recognisable melodies on ‘Just Shadows’.

Sympathy For Life is bookended with the record’s standout moments, ones that deftly denote maturation in their familiar style. 6/10 Zara Hedderman

Marissa Nadler — The Path of the Clouds (bella union) One of the primary driving forces behind the songs that make up this ninth studio album from Washington-born, Boston-based Marissa Nadler was apparently a quarantine-inspired fixation with the show Unsolved Mysteries. Given that much of the English-speaking world spent the early weeks of pandemic-enforced lockdown last year discussing the exploits of a mulleted, tiger-accruing maniac,

the concept of going quietly mad whilst overindulging in less-than-refined television is already one with which most could empathise, but Nadler, perhaps predictably, has found real beauty in, amongst other puzzlers, escapes from Alcatraz and the disappearance of D.B. Cooper.

They’re only ever used as thematic jumping-off points, anyway; there’s always a wider context, whether it’s to the aforementioned prison break on the country yarn of ‘Well, Sometimes You Just Can’t Stay’ or taking Cooper’s story and turning it into a self-empowering paean to taking control. Long-standing listeners will have a clear idea of what to expect from Nadler by now, but it remains interesting to see how she paints the lines within her own parameters; there’s room for stylistic variation, which on this record runs the gamut from the bluesy strut of ‘Couldn’t Have Done the Killing’ to the sparse, elegiac ‘Storm’. Highly atmospheric and conceptually intelligent, The Path of the Clouds is a worthy addition to Nadler’s impressively consistent catalogue. 7/10 Joe Goggins

Circuit Des Yeux — -io (matador) Grief can be both crushing and frustratingly amorphous. After the loss of a close friend, Haley Fohr became weighed down by its empty pull. Now, she uses her seventh album as Circuit Des Yeux to rebuild anew, to map out her despondency into something with a physical form. Starting from scratch, she arranges for a full 23-piece orchestra to make that emptiness more knowable.

The result is -io, an imposing concept album that’s part Western epic and part psych odyssey. It takes place on a land where “everything is ending all the

Albums time”, as Fohr puts it. With its timeless, off-world approach to baroque pop, it’s a surprisingly hi-fidelity offering from an artist who has frequently lurked in the shadows.

At the centre of these lofty songs is Fohr’s distinctive voice, which is frequently the most commanding instrument in the mix, even when surrounded by the guttural cellos of ‘Stranger’ or the death-march drums of ‘Dogma’. Her low, warbling vibrato at times becomes its own towering structure, like on the overwhelming vastness of ‘Vanishing’.

Fohr thrives in these grand moments, her flare for the dramatic elevating what is often dark and foreboding material. This theatrical approach might be too much in the quieter moments, such on the cumbersome closer ‘Oracle Song’, but it largely captivates.

Fohr’s approached writing -io by carefully constructing her emotional state, piece by piece. That methodical approach has given her a physical manifestation of grief that she can work to overcome, when mourning feels like shadowboxing. 6/10 Skye Butchard

NOUS, Laraaji & Arji OceAnanda — Circle (our silent canvas) If you tried hard enough, you could probably find pandemic-related context in any given release at the minute, but it’s particularly hard to shake when considering the backstory to this fourth and final chapter to the American composer Christopher Bono’s NOUS project. Bono (no relation, presumably) is a fascinating character in and of himself, having covered ground from roots rock to ambient post-rock in his early career (in the latter case, he founded the band Ghost Against Ghost),

before moving onto ambitious collaborative works. Evidently not somebody to do anything by halves, his last undertaking before NOUS was his concept album BARDO, a 60-minute contemporary classical musical drama that took thematic influence from the Tibetan Book of the Dead and was recorded on two continents, with the Prague FILMharmonic Orchestra serving as his massive 46-piece backing band.

If that was exhausting just to read about, then you can imagine how Bono was feeling by the time he was done with it. Craving a more hands-on role on his next record than he’d had as writer, producer and musical director of BARDO, he pivoted back to playing with NOUS, which was born out of a desire for more intimate collaborative work – get everybody in the same room, set the tape rolling and start improvising, effectively the antithesis of the closely-scripted nature of BARDO. ‘Everybody’, in this case, refers to a revolving cast of musicians that, across the NOUS sessions, has included a sevenstrong core that includes Bono, Real Estate and Titus Andronicus producer Kevin McMahon and Thor Harris of Swans, among others. It’s a genuinely varied cast of characters, with some contributors making immediate sense in this experimental context (Shahzad Ismaily, for instance, who’s worked with Yoko Ono and Laurie Anderson in the past), and others who seem more incongruous (Anthony Molina of Mercury Rev, or Gyða Valtýsdóttir from Icelandic electronica stalwarts múm, credited here by her solo moniker of Imago).

Viewed now through the prism of the past 18 months, there’s obviously an added poignancy just to the very basic concept of musicians sitting in a room and riffing together, and, taken in tandem with the feel and theme of this final NOUS outing, Circle of Celebration feels like an ideal balm for both artist and listener after such a tumultuous period.

It’s a three-way collaboration between NOUS, the veteran U.S. ambient musician Laraaji and his long-time collaborator, the sound healer Arji OceAnanda, for

what the press release posits is a “transcendent experience” that “forces deep and uplifting contemplation”.

If this is beginning to sound a bit Rainbow Rhythms for your taste, stick with it; most striking about Circle of Celebration on first listen is the sheer warmth of it, something partly owed to the richness of the production but, on a deeper level, rooted in the elegant manner in which this stylistically diffuse ensemble weave in and out of each other. In a sense, it’s tricky to believe that the whole thing is improvised – surely they’d trip over one another once in a while – but key to the record’s success is its epic running time, clocking in at just under ninety minutes, which allows the compositions plenty of room to breathe and allows the musicians involved to afford each other the necessary space.

Some of the tracks represent genuine odysseys; the near-13-minute ‘Hari Ram’ feels like the centrepiece, not just because of its placing but because it embodies the experimental spirit of the project so wholly, with the spiralling chanted vocals dipping in and out of the mix over a backdrop of twinkly guitars, tribal percussion (which, at one thrilling point, encompasses an old-fashioned drum solo) and bursts of shimmering synth. ‘Through the Veil’ inverts the formula, bringing Bono’s post-rock chops to the fore, sprinkling over some Vangelis-style keys, and still, improbably, proving a fitting sonic environment for thoroughly soulful vocals.

Elsewhere, there are moments of quiet reflection (‘Floating’) and soothing interludes to provide pause for thought in between the intensity of the longer tracks; crickets chirp and water gently laps in the background on ‘In This Light’.

It’s on the panoramic closing track, meanwhile, that everything comes together at its most spectacular; clocking in at not far shy of twenty minutes, ‘Giving Praise’ serves as NOUS in microcosm, a relentlessly shape-shifting exercise in exhilaration. Circle of Celebration is a stirring ode to the power of collaboration, but also, in simpler terms, to music’s role as a vehicle for sheer joy. 9/10 Joe Goggins

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Live Sheets of noise and distortion collapse into an irresistible, industrial thud, drum machines clattering into thick swathes of bass as Stewart strips to the waist and pumps his fists at the crowd. Eyes wide and hair shaved, he’s a bullet of a man, in vaguely comic contrast with the more retiring Wright, who largely keeps his head down under a black hoodie save for the occasional pogo. Fresh from Chubby and the Gang’s second set of the day, the crowd in here are primed for something this visceral; so soon after the reopening of clubs, this blistering set provides a certain gurning catharsis that’s much appreciated.

End of the Road Festival Larmer Tree Gardens, Dorset 2 – 5 September 2021

Obviously it’s weird to be at a full capacity festival; obviously it’s weird to see sweaty music lovers crammed into big tops; obviously we’ve had a shit 18 months. None of this is news to anyone. But it’s so good to be able to do it all again.

Since its inception 15 years ago, End of the Road festival has been a consistent highlight of the British musical calendar, expanding with each edition without ever compromising on its expert curation. And it’d take a pretty cold-hearted cynic to be unmoved by its return after the pandemic-imposed year out; there’s a palpable buzz around the site from the off, and the lineup – forced to mainly consist of UK-based acts to minimise Covidrelated travel issues – doesn’t disappoint.

Here are the lessons we learned during the festival’s triumphant return.

Little Simz should be playing arenas.

Everyone knows Little Simz is a natural superstar. Having emerged at a similar high point for the mid-2010s grime revival as Stormzy, with a similarly magpie-like approach to genre – grime is certainly in the mix, but so are elements of dancehall, golden age hip-hop and drill, married to

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sleek funk and pop nous on her new album Sometimes I Might Be Introvert – it’s sort of baffling how the North London artist hasn’t yet achieved the same level of worldconquering fame as her Croydon counterpart. On the evidence of her performance on the Woods Stage this weekend, playing to a packed field ahead of King Krule’s final-night headline set, that kind of success surely can’t be far away. This is a show of the highest calibre: Simz, one of the best MCs in the game at the moment, oozes charisma as her impeccable live band augment her tracks with just the right amount of live flair. All the while, she looks perfectly at home in front of a festival main stage crowd, and has the tunes to back it up, tracks like ‘Boss’, ‘Woman’ and ‘Selfish’ bursting with colour and verve.

Even bigger stages await.

With the help of Giant Swan, EOTR can get pretty rowdy after hours.

Given End of the Road’s popularity with families and its tendency to book a great deal of polite, summer-afternoon indie, you might not expect to be able to enjoy pummelling, libidinous techno in a pulsating room after the headliners finish. But Giant Swan have other ideas.

Appearing as secret guests in the Tipi on Saturday night, Robin Stewart and Harry Wright set about pushing the tent’s (impressively muscular) soundsystem to its limit almost immediately.

Richard Dawson doesn’t think he’s very good. Between his two sets of the weekend – one with his psych-pop troupe Hen Ogledd, another playing his solo music – Richard Dawson participated in a live Q&A to a rapt audience at the Talking Heads stage (which also plays host to the weekend’s comedy line up), sharing pearls of wisdom about his craft and opening up about the meandering path he’s taken to the richly-deserved success he enjoys today. Astonishingly, this virtuosic guitarist with a multioctave vocal range and genius for minute lyrical detail lacks confidence in his ability, although he does admit that his music is far better now than when he was starting out in his teens and twenties. He “doesn’t know notes or chords”, often leaves his guitar out of tune, and recalls his acute imposter syndrome when asked to collaborate with Finnish experimental metal giants Circle on their forthcoming joint LP. Described by anyone else, this insecurity might come across as falsely modest, but you can’t help but believe the shy, diminutive Dawson. Either way, we’re blessed that he continues to have the courage to share his music with us – both of his performances this weekend are astounding.

Keeley Forsyth needs little accompaniment to entirely captivate a crowd. In a half-full Tipi Tent on Friday afternoon, arguably the weekend’s most striking performance unfolds, consisting of little

Live more than two people, a subtly-played organ and a microphone. Playing material from last year’s Debris, her debut album, and its follow-up EP, Photograph, Keeley Forsyth cuts a deliberately forlorn figure; her movement around the stage verges on the balletic, a slow-motion vogue that’s as entrancing as her dense, lump-in-throat vibrato. Her accompanying organist is restrained in the extreme, his chords shifting and shrugging just enough to root Forsyth’s vocals in the structure of her songs without boxing in her spontaneity.

At points, she grabs his shoulders or drapes her body over his, but he never reacts, his sparse playing and near-motionlessness allowing her the space she needs.

Tracks like ‘It’s Raining’ and ‘Debris’ need little decoration; on record they get next to none, but there’s even less here. Instead, every line is teased out by Forsyth, who seems unconcerned by specific tempos or time signatures, preferring to linger on key lines or phrases as their import is played out across her facial expression. Her grounding in drama is clearly visible here: she’s entirely consumed by her performance, drawing the audience closer and closer into her desolate, skeletal songs. There’s nothing quite like this at End of the Road, or anywhere else, this weekend.

“Post-punk doesn’t exist because punk never died”. Chubby and the Gang – most notably Charlie ‘Chubby’ Manning Walker

himself – seemed to be everywhere at End of the Road this year. They played two sets, one to a sweaty Big Top, another to a sweatier Tipi, both to frenetic crowds electrified by their beery, no-frills hardcore; when they weren’t performing, Chubby was variously spotted twatting a backstage swingball with cagefighter ferocity, and charging around Effing Forest (the site’s decorated woodland) as if he really needed to be at the Disco Ship right now.

Towards the end of their first set, Chubby feels he needs to get something straight. “Listen!” he snarls as he marches in circles between songs (the guy never stops). “I don’t care what anybody says: post-punk doesn’t fucking exist!

Because PUNK NEVER DIED!” Among the terrace-like cheers, a few chin-strokers look bemused by this furious repudiation of conventional music history. I guess bands like PiL would beg to differ, but I’m not gonna tell him – I saw how hard he hit that swingball.

Morris dancing: good, actually. You’d forgive the 86-year-old Shirley Collins for avoiding festivals so soon after the great post-Covid reopening – as superbly organised as EOTR always is, and as genuinely safe as it feels, it’s not as if everything’s gone to plan in the last couple of years. Regardless, it’s a real privilege to see Collins on Sunday afternoon, her renditions of traditional folk songs from a wealth of cultures a tonic to weary ears.

Each song is introduced and contextualised by Collins or a member of her band, the tales of her travelling through the Jim Crow-era American South with pioneering musicologist Alan Lomax now familiar, but very welcome nonetheless. Her voice may lack the range or dexterity of her youth, but it’s rich with character, a worthy vessel for the priceless sonic artefacts she’s here to share with us. Appropriately, she’s joined on the Garden Stage by a morris dancer, a sprightly older gentleman (like the members of Collins’ backing band) who just looks absolutely delighted to be there. And you know what? We feel the same.

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Film and Books

Freakscene: The Story of Dinosaur Jr (dir. philipp virus) All bands end up hating each other, but it’s practically where Dinosaur Jr started from. “I don’t know where people get this idea that playing music is supposed to be fun,” says J Mascis in Philipp Reichenheim’s new documentary.

“I guess we never had that.”

A younger Mascis played hardcore drums to 33rpm records spinning at an extra fast 45. “I was just sick of all that hippy shit,” he says. Backing his belief that expecting fun from making music “hinders a lot of people”, he ditched the instrument he truly loved, picked up a guitar that he’d soon master and formed Dinosaur Jr with drummer Murph – a stoner hippy, of course, who was “attracted to J’s anti-everything attitude.” “I always thought he hated me, so I don’t know why he wanted me in his band,” says bassist and final Dinosaur member Lou Barlow.

The obvious question is why do it then? Although don’t expect that to be answered by Freakscene, which shares a lot in common with the band it documents, including a vagueness that’s forever been connected to Mascis in particular. He talks on camera in his slooow Massachusetts drawl, seemingly unmoved by even the band’s most turbulent times, not pulling his punches but not explaining them away either. Barlow and Murph follow suit, the three of them seemingly numb to how they felt (and feel) about one another and what’s gone on between them since 1984. They’ve asked themselves another question: why bother figuring out why we do this?

Director Reichenheim’s new interviews with the band don’t probe for good reason: for one, he’s Mascis’ brother-in-law and presumably knows very well the blank stare he’d get in return for asking for elaboration; for another, there’s a lot to get through, and so the film continues at pace,

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albeit after the overly long opening credits that play out ‘Freakscene’ in its entirety yet forgets to include the credits themselves.

It’s a minor quirk that also befits band and film, made up, as it is, of vintage VHS live footage, cut-n-paste show posters and talking heads for a zero-dollar budget.

The cast of those talking heads – seemingly recorded over the last 10 years or so – is impressive because it features everyone you’re expecting it to and someone you’re not. Joining My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields for some kind (and true) words on Dinosaur Jr are Kim Gordon, Bob Mould, Henry Rollins and Thurston Moore.

Frank Black makes a brief appearance too, to try to explain what makes them such an important band. He fails, of course, but it’s fun watching him talk complete bollocks as he tries. At one point he’s just making noises and jamming his fingers together.

“I didn’t hate J until the later years,” says Barlow. Mascis marks the beginning of the end at before the release of You’re Living All Over Me in 1987. Maybe it’s comforting to know that even rockstars stay in jobs they hate for too long. Stuart Stubbs

Neon Screams: How Drill, Trap and Bashment Made Music New Again — Kit Mackintosh (repeater) For some time now, it’s been the received wisdom among a certain kind of cultural commentator that the last decade or two have seen an alarming deceleration in the rate of artistic (particularly musical) change. As Simon Reynolds so eloquently argued in Retromania, popular music is obsessed with its own past, and as points of access to the arts for working class and otherwise marginalised voices become fewer and further between, the risk-taking and sociality that’s essential for aesthetic innovation is afforded less licence. Neoliberalism has, the theory

goes, crushed the life from the social milieus out of which so much vital culture has historically emerged, with little more than pastiche and knowing referentiality left in its stead.

There are undoubted merits to that argument, but it’s been looking a little shaky for a while – at best limited, at worst actively discouraging to prospective innovators. An intervention in the discourse to refute it is long overdue: Kit Mackintosh’s Neon Screams seeks to provide just that.

Approximately, his thesis is this: since the late ’00s, a new Black Atlantic has emerged between London, New York, Lagos and Kingston, with bashment, drill and trap the aesthetic terrains of invention. The most important catalyst for this innovation has been Auto-Tune; or, more accurately, the speed at which the use of Auto-Tune has surged forward into new territory. Through creative use of this tool, pushing it far beyond a simple studio corrective and into the realm of what Mackintosh terms “vocal psychedelia”, artists like Vybz Kartel, Migos and Pop Smoke have contributed enormously to a wealth of sounds that bear as little resemblance to their hip-hop and dancehall antecedents as, say, jungle does to dub. Innovation is happening, Mackintosh contends, and at an alarming rate: it’s just not necessarily happening in the same places or the same ways as it did 15 or more years ago.

The book is a speedy, percussive read, vibrating with the enthusiasm of a writer who lives and breathes this stuff. It lacks the broad political-economic sweep of the very best work of writers like Reynolds or Mark Fisher, but then sociological rigour isn’t really in the remit of this short, excitable book: it’s a polemic, a rebuttal, rather than a study as such. And its central point – that music is constantly renewing itself, and it’s incumbent on us to keep trying to facilitate, celebrate, and participate in that, even as the media and materiality of the work changes beneath our feet – is vital, and well made. It feels like the beginning of a counter-argument rather than a complete riposte, but that’s healthy: as long as music keeps pushing forward, it’ll give us more ways to understand and interact with it. Luke Cartledge

1– 4 SEPT, LARMER TREE GARDENS, DORSET

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END OF THE ROAD 2022 HEADLINERS

IN Tirzah’s new album of avant-garde R&B is an enigmatic patchwork of noise and serenity from a pivotal period in her life.

THE Yet however personal Colourgrade may be, she couldn’t have made it alone, by Dominic Haley.

Photography by Matilda Hill-Jenkins

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MIX

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IT WAS SUNNY when I got on the tube.

By the time I emerge in North Greenwich, the sky has darkened and the weather has closed in. Even though it’s been a tourist attraction since the year 2000, this part of South London is one of those areas that seem to be terminally under construction, and it takes a couple of minutes to adjust to the swirling dust and sounds of cranes whirring overhead before I can get my bearings and figure out where I need to be.

Tirzah Mastin is standing nearby, nursing the last few dregs of a coffee and waiting outside Now Gallery. Dressed in a sweater, patterned trousers and flip flops, she’s curious to find out what’s happening inside. On paper, at least, it sounds amazing. Called My Head is a Jungle, it’s an exhibition of new work from graphic artist Manjit Thapp and the available literature promises an artificial jungle that doubles as a metaphor for the fractured nature of human memory. Tirzah rummages around in her bag and produces a boiled sweet, and with that, we head in.

Unfortunately, the real experience doesn’t match up with what the brochure promised. Expecting to meander through a maze of greenery, uncovering tangled thoughts and suppressed fears, instead we’re treated to an experience that is more like a cross between a Brick Lane poster sale and the outdoor section of a B&Q. The art is certainly interesting, the various portraits and images acting as a window to a deeply personal experience, and the art, hidden down nooks and crannies, is clearly intended to take you on an emotional journey, but it’s all a bit too sparse to be the immersive experience promised. It’s only when we reach the end that we discover something that really holds our attention. The far wall has been turned into a guestbook of sorts, and previous visitors have been invited to leave their deepest thoughts and confessions. Hundreds of little Post-it notes speak of anxieties, hopes, dreams and comments that range from the banal to actually quite profound. Together, we spend a good thirty minutes scouring the wall, looking for the best. Squatting on her haunches, Tirzah suddenly lets out a laugh. “Come look at this one,” she says. Peering down, I find the simple green note, covered in a shaky, childlike scrawl. It simply reads: “I FEEL OVERWHELMED BY: Apple Crumble.” I look back at Tirzah, who nods. “I know what they mean.”

Back outside, I ask her what she thinks of the exhibition.

“I have to say, it didn’t really grab me,” she shrugs. “Maybe I’m a bit too traditional, but I found all the extras a bit too distracting. I’d rather see something stripped back so that the message is really impactful, rather than being forced to be in a world or something. Don’t get me wrong, it was very skilful and I could see what they were going for, but there was just too much going on. There’s something about being forced to shut out everything that’s going on around you and just allowing the space to penetrate your thoughts.”

Tirzah is definitely one of the people you’d want to ask about visual art. Her early education was very much steeped in music, having left her Essex home aged 13 to concentrate on composition and the classical harp at the prestigious Purcell School for Young Musicians, just outside Watford. Burnt out by the time she graduated, she retrained at the London College of

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Fashion to become a graphic designer, and spent several years working in the capital’s fashion industry. You could say that she knows a thing or two when it comes to illustration.

“I stopped working about three and a half years ago, but that was more to do with having my baby,” she tells me. “I always intended to go back, and they were always really open and flexible about it, but it just never made sense timewise. I really love working there – everyone was really lovely and I think of them often. But miss it? Not really, I’ve just been way too busy.”

Faced with dealing with the pandemic with two young children in a flat in Peckham, she recently relocated to the South London suburb of Sidcup, mainly for the space and to be closer to friends and family. She’s modest when talking about her career in music and is always ready to spread the credit. Brushing her curls from her face in the whipping South London wind, she’s softly spoken, quick to laugh and disarmingly frank; a demeanour that is almost the total opposite of the raw, emotionally charged nature of her music. Blending R&B, grime and down tempo garage with experimental soundscapes and avant-garde song structures, her compositions are fractured and deeply enigmatic, leaving you feeling a warm sense of communion without fully understanding what it is that you just listened to.

Even though it left us both feeling a bit cold, there are parallels you can draw between Tirzah’s and Thapp’s work. Like the Birmingham-born illustrator, Tirzah’s output has a journal-like quality, using repeated motifs, phrases and textures to create a confessional map of human emotion. ‘Send Me’, the first track released from her new album, is a good example of what I mean. A typically minimal-sounding track with a blend of looping guitars and softly-spoken R&B vocals, its lyrics talk about conjuring the strength to be a mother. Written shortly after the birth of her second son, the lyrics speak of finding a new well of love within yourself. “Let me heal and now I’m sure,” she whispers on the song’s refrain. It’s both intimate and oddly distant, and like the best of Tirzah’s work, it reaches down deep and pulls up something that is truly transformational.

— Moments of pure serenity — Deciding to escape the sound of heavy construction, we head towards the river and find a quiet spot to continue our conversation. As we walk, we pass by the entrance to the O2 Arena and stop to take in a line of people silhouetted against the skyline as they begin their climb to the top of the kilometre-long dome to its viewing platform. As we watch, Tirzah recalls the time her class at school visited when it was called the Millennium Dome. “The only other time I’ve been here was when I came to watch Beyoncé,” she remembers as we continue on. “It was amazing, but I don’t know how she does it. She has to basically go out there and give 100% every time.”

She makes an interesting point. Popular opinion may paint pop musicians as a bunch of over-pampered millionaire divas – and in some regards they are – but when you think about what they actually have to do on stage, the bigger you are, the more impossible it becomes to simply phone it in. On top of that, there’s spending almost every waking moment rehears-

“A lot of it is about what you take out rather than what you leave in. It’s about what’s best for the record” 55

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ing, performing and promoting, and the constant feeling that you have to be somewhere and be doing something. I ask Tirzah if, on the more indie side of the fence, she’s ever felt the same kind of pressure. “Gosh, I mean, never say never, but nothing like that,” she answers after a short pause. “Obviously, there’s pressure all around you, but there’s no comparison. I don’t take it on board like that; I’ve never found music to be this allencompassing, all-consuming thing that takes over your life, and I don’t think I’d ever want it to. That’s nuts – I couldn’t imagine a life like that.”

Looking around for a quiet spot, we eventually find a bench where we can watch the boats as they navigate the river.

Almost immediately, a British Airways jet roars overhead to completely destroy the sense of tranquillity. Inevitably, the conversation quickly focuses on Colourgrade, Tirzah’s second album, her first in three years. Written while she was in the depths of promoting her debut, Devotion, it was recorded in the downtime between the birth of her first child and shortly before her second child was born. Almost subconsciously, it ended up being a snapshot of what turned out to be a pivotal year in the singer’s life, and almost unintentionally, the songs weave together the thoughts, themes and energy of a time of pregnancy, birth and of being a new parent.

“Mostly we wanted this record to be a fresh start and a clean slate,” she explains. “Devotion was the culmination of years and years worth of working together, but all that was kind of a memory by the time we got back to the studio. It was an exciting feeling to be able to write with the knowledge that these songs didn’t have to be for something or get sent anywhere. For the first time in ages, we could just let them be what they wanted to be.”

The result is an album that can be quite disorientating at times. Oscillating between discordant noise and moments of pure serenity, Colourgrade’s more abstract sounds are closer to the more freeform feel of Tirzah’s early YouTube mixtapes than her previous studio album. According to the singer, a lot of this is down to the improvisational nature of her writing process.

“More often than not, I’m reacting to the music Coby [Sey] and Mica [Levi] are making, so most of the time I’m trying to find a poem that goes along with it,” she says when we chat about how she created the record. “That means that the phrasing often ends up strongly dictating what the words are going to be; it’s really more important that you’re capturing the intent behind a phrase rather than trying to squash in loads of words and be overly descriptive. It’s the only way you can stay true to the essence of how you felt when you were in that moment, so it means that the album has ended up incorporating a whole mishmash of different feelings and inspirations, rather than being about just one thing.”

Predictably, motherhood has been the theme that most press coverage has focused on ahead of the album’s release this October. In the official press release for the record, it’s described as being “inspired by a type of love between a mother and a child, while simultaneously working as an artist.” Tirzah, however, sees the connection as circumstantial at best. While it’s definitely a source of energy for Colourgrade, she is also determined that

the record paints a picture that balances the spiritual aspects of being a mum with the much more mundane side of things. “To me, as a musician, whether you’re playing the oboe or the double bass, you’re putting your feelings into whatever you’re playing.

Similar to when you’re writing something, your thoughts and feelings go into the words, but it’s never been about me sitting down thinking, ‘I’m going to write about this or that.’

“I’m a musician and I’m a mum, so naturally those things are going to intertwine, but it really doesn’t go any further than that. It’s not like this is the album about motherhood. Obviously, the record still means a lot to me as I know it will carry these feelings, but it doesn’t feel right to say that this album is only about this one thing.”

Besides, Colourgrade is far too nebulous for that; it’s a record that is more about moods, moments and textures, much like the photographic technique from which it takes its name, involving tweaking exposures and manipulating tones to get closer to the essence of what the photographer is trying to convey. “I think the title comes from the song on the record more than anything,” says Tirzah. “I just felt that the song ‘Colourgrade’ represented the spectrum of feelings and textures we were going for. It just seemed to be emblematic of what we were doing right there and then. I didn’t know what it meant to be honest, it was just something that I wrote, but when I heard it was a real process I was kind of like, ‘Do I still want to call it that?’, and the answer was, ‘Yeah, why not?’. Anyone can take any word they want and change the meaning – it’s one of the best things about being an artist.”

— The Great Curator — Throughout our conversation, Tirzah is keen to make sure that Colourgrade is seen as a team effort, and she’s happy to concede that a big part of the thinking came from her longtime collaborator Mica Levi. It’s a partnership that stretches back to the pair’s school days at Purcell, through the early years in London when Levi was a rising star on the city’s underground music scene with Micachu and the Shapes, when Tirzah still worked a day job in graphic design. The relationship is still going strong today, even as Levi’s success seems unstoppable. Transforming herself from a regular at Peckham’s nightclubs to an Oscar-nominated composer and sound artist, recent years have seen her pick up a stream of accolades and critical applause, particularly for her work on the soundtracks for Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin and Pablo Lorrain’s Jackie.

“So far, we’re still friends, at least,” chuckles Tirzah when I ask about her work with Levi. “I honestly couldn’t imagine working any other way. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve never wanted to be a ‘stuckist’ and just stick religiously to one way of doing things. In the past, I’ve done stuff with Bauer, Mura Masa and Tricky – all really great experiences that felt like dipping my toes into other worlds – but I’ve always believed that music should be a sharing thing and I’ve always been more comfortable when I’m working with my closest friends. I’ve been super lucky that I’ve been able to keep that going for so long. It’s always really lovely whenever we get a chance to get together.”

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Levi’s fingerprints are on almost every aspect of Colourgrade. In fact, the more we speak, the more it becomes clear that Tirzah’s role is closer to curator than instigator. Describing one of the duo’s typical jam sessions, she reveals that the songs are mostly portmanteaus taken from different parts of an improvisation. Working together, a lot of her time is spent sifting through the various jams, identifying the moments that resonate and weaving them back together into a more fleshed-out, captivating experience.

“Not a lot of people talk about this, but a lot of the creative process is in the mixing, mastering and the ordering,” she explains. “A lot of it is about what you take out rather than what you leave in. You have to think about what’s best for the record, and make those sacrifices.”

No doubt a key factor in Tirzah’s distinctive sound, this relationship with Levi is, however, just one of many partnerships that fuel the singer’s creativity. Even though she does all the interviews, shows up for the photo shoots and features in most of the videos, Tirzah is more inclined to view her output more as a tapestry and describes herself more as a member of a band than a straight-up solo artist.

“Looking back, it’s always kind of confusing to me why we ended up calling all this ‘Tirzah’,” she says. “It was just one

it actually works is something that often gets lost in the muddle, and it tends to end up with just one person representing the work of all these different people. In some small way, it was great to be able to put something out that addressed that.”

‘Hive Mind’ is a tribute to this sense of community, the call-and-response vocal a duet between Tirzah and another longtime collaborator, Coby Sey, who also contributes lyrics to new single ‘Tectonic’. It’s one of a number of tracks on Colourgrade that features the extended CURL collective, a tightly-knit group of interdisciplinary artists that also includes Levi and Brother May amongst their number. Sey’s elder brother, producer Kwes, also happened to mix most of the album.

Tirzah seems genuinely thrilled to have Sey more closely involved. “It just felt really natural to have him on this one,” she says. “We worked really closely together, writing words and poems on the board of the studio and reciting and singing them together. We’ve been working and playing live since we toured in support of Devotion and it felt really right to have him more involved on this record. It was really special.

“As an artist, I think the people you work with are important as it creates a network and kinship with people that are also making music in a way that is always open and carefree,” she says with a widening grin.

“Looking back, it’s always kind of confusing to me why we ended up calling all this ‘Tirzah’” of those quick-fire decisions that I ended up saying ‘Ok, cool’ to.

I didn’t really think much more about it than that. I mean, I get that it’s quite abstract-sounding – most people wouldn’t know it was a name – but looking back I’m not sure it was a good choice.

I’ve always felt like it’s a real team effort, and I don’t think the name gives that impression.”

If you do want to get an impression of what that extended crew looks like, then it’s really worth checking out the video for recent single ‘Hive Mind’. Directed by Leah Walker and Rebecca Salvadori, it’s a ten-minute mini-documentary that begins with around six minutes of footage of the whole gang just hanging out around their favourite south London spots. As Tirzah invites you in with a flower, the video follows the group as they move between what looks like a birthday party, a warehouse show and scenes of traversing suburban streets. Taken as a whole, it’s a collage of sorts, an electrifying roadmap to the connections between humans, nature and the environment that shape a group of friends.

“It was totally Leah and Rebecca’s idea,” she says. “They collected all of the material and just found that it started to fall together into this film-like narrative. We just kind of went with that. I think what is so cool is that it really captures what we’re about. I think the way people perceive the process and the way

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It’s common for many parents to find that their friendship groups shrink as soon as they have kids, but in Tirzah’s case it feels like the group dynamic is only getting stronger. “Don’t get me wrong, being a mum has been full-on and you’re busy,” she says, “but it’s important to take the time and make sure that you can still keep in touch with people. When I was younger, I was free to go to more shows and hang out more and it’s been great to keep at least a small aspect of that. I mean, I’m not solitary, but also I could never be called a social butterfly, so I couldn’t say I was really out there. But speaking for myself, it’s great to be among a bunch of people who still feel the love for one another.”

Yet another passenger jet howls over, drawing a line under our conversation. Tirzah pauses to fish a boiled sweet out of her bag before she readies herself to find a taxi. Before she leaves, she turns back to deliver one last thought. “It really does take a community to make music. You’re always feeding off one another, inspiring and encouraging them in the same way that they’re inspiring and encouraging you. I’ve always said that it takes more than one person to make a song, unless you’re Prince or something, and it’s nice when you’re able to pay tribute to that in some way or form.”

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Fancy sauce in the Idiot Room

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We asked Mac DeMarco to interview Tonstartssbandht for us,

by Jess Wrigglesworth

There is a long history of friendship between Tonstartssbandht, aka brothers Andy and Edwin White, and Mac DeMarco.

Meeting for the first time in Canada in the late 2000s, when DeMarco was still playing with his old band Makeout Videotape, they have since lived together and toured together, with Andy eventually joining Mac’s band. So, we thought, who better to interview the White brothers about their upcoming 18th (!) album – their best record yet, which mixes experimental rock with psych, blues and boogie, krautrock and the occasional nod to Arthur Russell. Over a Zoom call from Shangri-La in Malibu (“Bob Dylan’s old crib”), Mac asked his friends about the process of making Petunia, and also, mostly, the good old days.

Mac DeMarco: Ok, let me get professional here. We got to do the interview. Let’s start with the record, that’s easy. When was it made?

Edwin White: Last year.

M: During COVID or before?

E: Right smack dab in the middle.

Andy White: Yeah when we were in Florida. It’s funny to think about, but I guess we hadn’t had a super-concentrated amount of time, both in the same place with time on our hands to make a record in a while.

M: So you homebrewed at the crib in Orlando, but you mixed it in…

A: In San Francisco, at Idiot Room, with my two favourite idiots Joe Santarpia and Roberto Pagano.

M: And then where was it mastered? Wait! What am I fucking saying, “Where was the record mastered?” Let’s tell them when I met you guys.

E: We met in Canada. Me and Edwin were living in Montreal at the time and I believe you passed through with Makeout Videotape M: This is true. This would have been 2009? But I remember hearing about Tonstartssbandht before that tour. My roommate came up in the living room one day and he was like, “Whoa dude, you have a show booked with Tonstartssbandht in Montreal, and I was like, ‘Yeah, they’re cool,’” and he was like, “Yeah, dude. I’ve seen them on a lot of blogs.”

E: Ha! M: In those days, it was all about the blogs baby.

E: We were getting blogged about man.

M: And then we played that show at Zoo Bizarre. I remember one of you, I can’t remember which, Eddie, was it you that got like really, really drunk that night?

E: Oh, God. Yeah, that was fucked up.

M: And Andy, you were walking around like, “Who did this to my brother?! Who did this?!”

E: That might have been the most drunk I’ve ever been in my entire life.

M: Who else played, did Homosexual Xops play that show or no?

A: They played outside the venue cos they weren’t allowed to play.

M: That’s right. They pulled up in the roofless jeep! I’m trying to think of more interesting memories...

A: I guess we all used to live together.

M: This is true. In New York City, at the Meat Wallet. For the fine readers of Loud And Quiet, we lived in a warehouse. Eddie kind of had the presidential suite in there – private bathroom.

E: I had my own toilet!

M: That’s another great memory I have of the Wallet; Eddie, I remember that you used to, in your private bathroom – you know some people light matches to get rid of the smell after they use the washroom – you used to just light a BIC lighter near the toilet bowl.

A: I think I was the person who eventually explained to Edwin how that works. And it was only maybe two or three years ago. So Ed would have been 30.

M: Thinking even further back, I remember coming to your apartment when we had just moved to Montreal. And Andy, you hit up me and Kira, and you were like, “You guys should come over for dinner.” And we came over and I think you made three different kinds of boiled potatoes and ketchup.

A: My roommate had introduced me to the idea of ‘fancy sauce’, which is mayonnaise and ketchup, and the best thing to put that on is starched food. He was like dude, you can live for nothing and eat like a king. Pierogies, home fries, mashed potatoes. That was the year I got cancer. I wonder if it had anything to do with it…

E: I don’t think potatoes give you cancer.

M: You never know nowadays, with the way these farms are going. I remember we came through Montreal once when you were still really sick. And I think you came to the show but you were quite ill.

A: I had opened like a stitched up surgery wound from losing my testicles. And it’s funny because I wanted to be low key about it, and not talk about it at the time, because I felt very private and kind of ashamed and all that shit, but I was excited you guys were in town and I went to y’all’s show, and I was kind of hobbling because I was recovering from surgery. And in my head I was like, “People are gonna respect me.? And there’s

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some other dude at the show who had like a broken leg with a big cast on and crutches and everyone was like, “Dude, are you okay?” to that guy. And I was just like, “I want to get the fuck out of here, this sucks.”

M: What other good memories can we do? You guys toured as Tonstartssbandht with my band in Europe one time.

A: That was a very memorable tour because I recall at the time, Peter [Sagar, aka Homeshake] had announced that he wasn’t going to play in your live band anymore. And we had settled that I would replace him, but he wasn’t gonna leave for another few months.

M: You guys were opening for us at Webster Hall in New York, and before we played, Peter and I were in the green room, and it has a window out to the stage and I think you were playing a cover of ‘Picture Book’ by The Kinks. And Peter was like, “I’m not gonna play in the band anymore.” And I was like, “Okay, fuck, I gotta find a new guitar player,” and then I just looked out the window and was like, “Okay, yeah, cool. No problem.” But you guys also opened for us on that tour we did in the South.

A: Yeah, we did like Atlanta, Nashville and some of the Eastern Seaboard.

M: Yeah, and we went to that festival, in Gulf Shores.

E: Oh, where we watched Weezer play!

M: We watched Weezer play. We also went to that deep fried seafood restaurant like four times.

E: Oh my God, I got cooked like a lobster. I was so red it was insane. I also remember that show you played in Forest Hills, Queens.

M: At Raoul’s house. That was the first night I ever met Michael Collins [Drugdealer, Silk Rhodes].

A: I recall watching Michael enter the room and meet you guys, and everyone’s faces lighting up. It was really cool.

M: Yeah it was fun. We were also all doing poppers a lot that night, so that was really... interesting. On that same tour, we played that afternoon show at that bar in Brooklyn, which absolutely no one came to.

E: That was our big break.

A: I remember playing that show and being like, if we don’t play, there isn’t a show. There’s nobody here, we could just go.

M: It just didn’t really matter.

A: Every time another band would go on, I’d be like, who’s making us do this?

M: We were. But that was the tail end of a tour where most of our shows had been like that as well. So it’s like, “Well, we might as well just do it.” But Raoul’s house, that was pretty bumpin’. But that’s a lot of stories, let’s talk about the new record for these people. It’s a little bit of a different direcsh, I guess?

A: I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that we were able to just sit down and focus on it. It’s the first record we’ve ever done in one sitting, even if it took us a couple months. So all the songs kind of feel like they fit together in a way, and it’s not based off of hitting record and jamming, and then splicing stuff together, like we’ve done on some previous records.

Like, when I was getting set up in the studio, and I would call you being like, ‘does this make sense if I put a mic here.’ It was very deliberate – we took our time to get it set up and then do

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a bunch of takes. So I guess, stylistically, I think it sounds like Tonstartssbandht but…

M: I think so too yeah, but it does sound a little more precise in a way. But what’s the consensus on the vibe, because before you guys were kind of like try this, plug this in, get this amp going. Maybe not thrown together, but more spur of the moment. How was the new vibe, how did it feel?

E: I mean, it felt good but because it was so focused and so like trying to do it right. It was harder at first because we had done it so casually before. So it was more challenging, especially for me because you know, I don’t practice the drums unless I’m supposed to play em, so I was like, damn, these are hard songs.

M: I think you got it.

E: I nailed it, don’t get me wrong, but it was more challenging.

A: On breaks between Tonstartss and Mac tours in the last like, four years or whatever, we would set up a little bit and try and do these songs – cos most of these are old songs – more spur of the moment like you were saying Mac. But there were so many recordings where I was like, this sounds like garbage.

For some reason, these songs, the way I’ve been writing them, I guess, nothing’s clicking, nothing’s sparkling, nothing feels right about working like this. I was like, I think we will get this right if we take our time, to make sure that we focus on it. And setting aside time was hard to do until the pandemic.

M: Yeah, thank God for that global pandemic, hey?

A: I’m very grateful not to have been writing music during the pandemic, because it was more of a functional thing – we had to stay home for a week and finally do the things we’d been meaning to do, whether it was retiling the bathroom or recording the album.

M: Yeah, exactly. I think that was kind of the vibe, I’ll talk to other people that aren’t necessarily musicians, and they’re like, “Have you been doing anything?” and it’s like, “No!” I don’t think anybody felt like being creative, necessarily. But, that’s the same thing I had – it was like, “Ok, I’m just gonna fix everything in the garage, and I’ll rewire everything, but like, I didn’t really want to write a song.” I felt kind of bleak, you know?

A: Everything felt so stupid. I usually don’t get a good escape from my current reality by writing music, I get it from playing music. So recording helped to forget how fucking stupid everything was. Mac, Roberto told me when I saw him a couple weeks ago that during the pandemic you became a bit of a car guy.

M: I did for a little bit yeah. I got an old Toyota Land Cruiser; we did a suspension lift in Mike Collins’ driveway. We put all the dumb stuff in, so I have this insane apocalypse car that I don’t ever use any of the shit on. I mean, I drive this car every day, but I don’t need all the crap on it. The gas mileage on it is already bad enough.

E: Do you still have that yellow Volvo? What’s your main whip?

M: No it’s this Toyota. All the Volvos are gone.

E: I have a Toyota too, and so does he. You know, we all have Toyotas!

M: Yeah, they’re good cars. What can I say?

E: This is not a paid ad.

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Final Third: Cold Take

Got your number A whole generation remembers Leeds Festival as a weekend that would inevitably end with tents and toilets on fire. But was it idiocy or insurrection? Andrew Anderson revisits his teenage wonderland with others who were there to find out, and to ask what were the real highs and lows that came with a weekend of drinking Carling

Carling. What is Carling? Why is Carling? Who drinks Carling?

I’ve never had satisfactory answers to any of these questions.

From what I can work out, Carling is a sort of corporate simulacrum for what beer is meant to taste like; an alcoholic Soylent Green. You only consume it when there’s no other choice, when it’s forced on you at gigs, festivals and other events.

It’s frothy and foamy. For a while it branded itself as “the taste of England”, perhaps because if you took the median flavour of every pavement in England it would taste like Carling. It tastes like it’s warm even when it’s cold.

But this isn’t an article about Carling. So why am I talking about it? Because Carling – frothy, stupid, bad-tasting Carling – is forever synonymous with UK music festivals from the mid2000s. You arrived, you drank Carling for three days, and then left, as though you were part of some giant pharmaceutical experiment… as though, another 20 years from now, we can expect everyone who attended to start dropping dead from some unexplained Carling-induced syndrome.

Sorry. This really isn’t about Carling. It’s actually about Leeds Festival – specifically, Leeds Festival in its early-to-mid2000s format. Leeds Festival with Guns N’ Roses headlining.

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Leeds Festival with the burning toilets and tents and riot police. Leeds Festival sponsored by… Carling.

Leeds (as it was always called) was my first festival experience, the first time I’d been away from home for a few days as a proper teenager (i.e. a teenager that drinks alcohol and has a preoccupying sexual interest in other teenagers). I went to Leeds three years straight, from 2002-2004. There was the bad stuff – the Carling, the casual violence – but it was also a lot of fun, and some great bands played during those years: The Strokes, The Breeders, The White Stripes (for any young people reading, back then it was a necessary to have ‘the’ before your band name for tax purposes). When I was 16, the festival felt incredibly exciting, almost utopian. By the end it felt like something for kids; a bit boring for the kind of mature, urbane 18-year-old that I saw myself as.

And, to be honest, after that last festival in 2004, I’ve never really thought about Leeds again. That was, until about two months ago, when I watched the Netflix documentary Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage. As the nu-metal moshing, toilet burning and crowd-surf groping played across the screen it felt worryingly familiar. I’d seen this all before. I’d seen it at Leeds Festival. And, as I kept watching, and the talking heads came on and said how sexist, violent and horrible the whole thing was, I began to feel a bit strange. This formative experience of my teenage years… was it a bad thing? Was it just a weekend of toxic masculinity? What was the truth?

It’s not easy to look back and judge the past fairly. You tend to project your present morals onto past actions and events, and that rarely ends up with a favourable verdict. The past, as they, is a foreign country (well, L.P. Hartley said it, according to Wikipedia… and no, I’ve never read his books either).

But I do want to investigate what Leeds Festival was back then. Was it as bad as Woodstock 99 – a negative, aggressive space lubricated by the worst lager imaginable? Were the riots that took place every Sunday, like some sort of moon-timed pagan ritual, actual riots, or was it always just a few morons

Final Third: Cold Take burning gas canisters? And what about the positives – the music, the friendship, the (for a 16-year-old, at least) freedom – do they balance the equation?

To help me answer these questions I spoke to people who went to Leeds Festival during those years. Some were teenagers like me, going to their first festival. Others were in their early twenties and just looking for a party.

— The Riots — Let’s start with the thing that everyone remembers: the riots. Except, were they really riots? When I posted about this article on a festival forum, asking for stories from people who remembered the riots, I got this response from ‘Jump’ (his avatar is Lego Batman, in case you’re interested): “It’s hardly a ‘riot’. It’s a few dickheads tipping over toilets and setting fire to their tents on the Sunday night and even then it’s isolated to certain parts of the camp so you can miss it completely. I can’t wait for the article to dress it up as something like the UK Tibetan uprising. Lol.” Lol indeed. But does Jump have a point? To pull a lawyerin-the-Simpsons move, the dictionary defines a riot as “a violent disturbance of the peace by a crowd”. In raw numbers, Leeds Festival meets that definition: In 2002 alone there was £250,000 of damage.

And the people I spoke to certainly remember these events as riots. “There were loads of bonfires all over the campsite and it felt really wild and tribal,” recalls Olivia. “I felt quite scared to be honest. The last time I went, someone thought my tent was empty and I woke up to someone saying, ‘Let’s burn this big blue one.’ I had to open the door and persuade them not to burn it.”

Jen has similar memories: “I remember seeing huge fires and quite an astonishing disregard for human life and I do remember thinking, ‘Oh shit this could actually be quite dangerous’, which was quite a big thing for an immortal, death wish, nu-metal 17-year-old.”

But not everyone experienced these events in such a negative way. For example, Alison, who told me: “There was a mad riot, hundreds of riot police. It was so exciting and I got a load of free beer from people raiding the Carling wagons… I was 18 so I was loving it.”

Simon agrees with that sentiment: “People were doing it for a laugh, it wasn’t to express any anger or anything.

I remember getting talking to one lad who was just giving beer away to anyone who asked – he was really, really friendly, just wanted a chat. One bloke took a can, opened it and just chucked it into the burning toilet block.”

Others were kind of intrigued by the spectacle: “I went on a walk to see what the locals were up to the night of the riot,” says Adam. “We were already away from the action looking down on it from a hill, but we started edging further away when they [the riot police] started banging their shields with their truncheons.

Properly fucked off from it when they charged.”

Some, like Shaun, missed it altogether (thanks to a phony backstage pass): “I didn’t hear anything at all. I could hear a sound like a football crowd over in the distance but put it down to high spirits.”

As with most things, your opinion depends on your perspective. If you felt scared and physically threatened, then yes, it was a riot. If you didn’t, then it felt like idiocy rather than an insurrection. But the balance of evidence seems to suggest they were indeed riots, even if they don’t quite meet the ‘Tibetan Uprising’ standards of our friend Jump.

— The dodgy burgers and dodgier music — So what caused these annual riots? At Woodstock 99 the extreme heat, extreme prices and extremely bad music pushed people over the edge. Was it the same for Leeds? Well, the food and drink were definitely not up to much. “I barely ate and just drank weak lager the whole fest,” remembers Gill. “I now cannot stomach Carling.”

Recalls Olivia: “I was eating really basic burgers and chips in those polystyrene trays.

The toilets were just rancid rows of… wooden constructions over giant holes dug in the ground.”

And just like at Woodstock 99, where Fred Durst asked the crowd to “Break stuff ”, there was some antagonism from the acts on stage that might have encouraged rioting.

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Final Third: Cold Take “I remember seeing Guns N’ Roses and liking the new guitarist cos he wore a KFC bucket on his head”

“Primarily I remember Marilyn Manson,” says Jen. “We have always loved the way he said ‘LEEEEDSAA’ and I always assumed he’d caused our riot by making the crowd chant ‘fight, fight, fight’.”

But despite dodgy toilets, high prices (the organisers weren’t called Mean Fiddler for nothing) and of course the nu metal, most people I spoke to enjoyed themselves. As they tell it, Leeds didn’t have the hostile frat-boy feel of Woodstock.

“I just loved being together with my mates checking all this stuff out,” enthuses Simon, who cites The Strokes, The White Stripes and The Music as his favourites he saw in those years. “[Leeds Festivals] for me were an escape from reality,” says Olivia. “A weekend of indulgence away from schedules, study, my problems; a place to just enjoy myself. That energy would sustain me in real life for months.”

Others appreciated the sheer silliness of the whole thing. “I remember seeing Guns N’ Roses and liking the new guitarist cos he wore a KFC bucket on his head,” says Gill, who adds that another highlight was, “Watching my boyfriend shit himself on the ferris wheel – he was terrified.”

— The entitlement — So if people were having fun, why did the rioting happen every year? Some people told me it was actually locals from a nearby council estate that caused the problems, but that seems unlikely – if only because Leeds Festival moved locations and the rioting persisted. One of the people I spoke to, Jen, came out with what I believe is probably the truth: people did it because they felt they could.

“The festival was generally full of people young enough and privileged enough to risk jumping in the police patrol car, pushing the toilets over and setting fire to the whole fucking place,” explains Jen. “It was a very masculine energy for sure.”

This goes back to Jump’s “a few dickheads” theory that I discussed at the start of the article, and while I might disagree about it being a few, it’s hard to think of any real reason other than entitlement. And even though I didn’t take part, I can defi-

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nitely see the temptation of smashing and burning things if you think there are no consequences.

And what about what Jen says about masculine energy?

At Woodstock 99 the groping got so bad that bands like The Offspring started decrying it from the stage. As a man I can’t speak to my own experience with this, but I can say that no one I spoke to for this article mentioned groping or sexual harassment in general (which doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, of course).

From everything I’ve heard over the past few weeks, Leeds Festival doesn’t seem to be the nu metal cultural nadir that Woodstock 99 was (despite Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park and Papa Roach all playing there from 2000-2003). Yes, it had crap food, steep prices and sanitary standards that seemed bad even to a teenage boy. Yes, the violence on Sundays could be a bit scary, and you only need to look at the line up to see that it was basically a corporate cash in (how else could Primal Scream, Sum 41 and Metallica play together on the main stage on the same night?). But somehow it was good in spite of it.

Olivia sums it up: “If you found yourself on your own there was always someone to talk to and become instant best mates with. The crowds were always really supportive and I remember being picked up out of mosh pits by bigger blokes and having my hair braided and my face decorated by other girls.”

All of which brings me back to Carling. Because (hear me out) Carling is a lot like Leeds Festival. On the surface, Carling is gross, weird, and it has the taste and texture of a semolina bubble bath. But go beneath the surface and you’ll find… well, actually you’ll find that it’s still gross. But here’s the thing: it works. Drink enough Carling, get past those numerous bad points, and you will get drunk. And it was the same with Leeds – if you forced yourself to move past the bad stuff – the violence, the dirt, the Limp Bizkits – you could still hear great music, escape your everyday life, and have a good time with your friends. You could even, if you tried really hard, enjoy a pint of Carling.

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Final Third: In Conversation

A perpetual sunset

Following a period of extreme grief and isolation, Haley Fohr returned to her Circuit des Yeux moniker to save herself with music, by Georgina Quach.

Photography by Evan Jenkins 68

Final Third: In Conversation Content note: this interview contains references to death threats, suicide, and mental ill-health There are few performers who would shake off death threats in response to their voice and fearlessly continue touring their music, but one of them is Haley Fohr (aka Circuit des Yeux), who has, for almost a decade and a half, deployed her unique baritone vocals to shattering effect. Even if Fohr’s lower register – which has set her apart since her school choir days – is lost on certain listeners, she has always found music to be her saviour during her lowest periods.

Speaking to her ahead of the release of her most orchestrated album to date, I learn that music-making is her foundation, which she has built vast and cosmic enough to subsume the manifold loss, isolation and grief that have marred her recent years.

Following the musical journey of the Indiana-born, Chicago-based songwriter takes us on innumerable twists and turns, unraveling more mysteries the further we get into her world of dark, experimental folk. Following her 2017 album, Reaching for Indigo, Fohr released more psychedelic music under her outlaw cowboy alter ego Jackie Lynn, before returning to her Circuit des Yeux persona. And then she retreated. Following the death of a close friend, Fohr disappeared from view, and stopped writing music at all. She fought depression and loneliness, but somehow, through the turbulence of her mourning and the global pandemic, she found a way back to creating, shaping ideas that would eventually lead to her musical return.

Circuit des Yeux’s first album in four years, -io, out October 22 via her new deal with Matador, emerges as a simultaneously triumphant and devastating release of emotions. Fohr pairs her four-octave voice with a 24-piece orchestra, stitched through with a cavernous organ. She wrote, arranged and produced the record on her own. “Faith, it stings like the sun,” she whispers against a nightmarish guitar in ‘The Chase’, sounding like the distant threat of someone scratching at your door, while studies in gravity (and black holes) played their part in -io too, which goes some way to explaining -io’s incredible cover art – a photograph of Fohr in freefall, which is no green screen trick.

Rather than resign herself to the pit of isolation and selfdoubt she was sinking into, Fohr began giving form to exactly those feelings, writing in a way that isn’t simply confessional, but allows listeners to feel that their own darkness was being expressed. On our call, she sits basked in candlelight, before a sunset terracotta backdrop, as though depicting the glimmers of hope which have not yet receded into the night.

Georgina Quach: Can you take me to the origins of -io?

Haley Fohr: There’s a lot going on in this record. It is more about a phase of my life. It was, for lack of a better term, harrowing. The pandemic and the couple of years beforehand were very hard for me, so I utilised music in a way that I always have, which is just to give my emotions and my experiences validity. That’s getting harder and harder to do. But this record harnesses those

really challenging moments of reckoning that deals with death and grief, but also love and loss. Mental health, certainly.

GQ: How do you feel about it?

HF: This is the biggest project I’ve ever taken on. It felt necessary. I’ve never felt so goddamn sad and desolate, and hopeless in my life. It was a situation where I had a lot of loss, and then, as I was hoping to recover, there was more loss and more death. I just felt like the only way out of it was to do this very huge, but solitary record. And I didn’t want to stop until the music matched my emotions.

GQ: When did the project start to take shape and do you remember your initial hopes for it?

HF: It started unknowingly in May 2019. I was in London at that time for a solo show, and I was also scoring a film soundtrack. I was staying in this Best Western hotel for four days. It was very budget; the bed and end table were all bolted to the ground, and there was this weird astroturf carpeting. I had an onslaught of major depression, the kind of which I haven’t had since I was 17 or 18 years old. I live with depression. It’s usually something I can keep tethered to and keep an eye on, but this was something else. And I was really, really sick for those four days and was by myself. I reached out to a few people, who are my friends and confidantes when I’m having mental health issues.

I wrote this song called ‘Sickness’, which I performed later that night at [London venue] Kings Place. I have not performed it since, and that song did not make it on the record. But that was the beginning.

GQ: Did you find that performance cathartic?

HF: I told the audience I was not feeling well, and that I was going to play the song. They were so wonderful and sweet, but looking back, I really wish I did not go past this fourth wall.

I wasn’t able to really give myself. I didn’t really find any relief after that show. It was just more of like... taking some necessary precautions to deal with the situation at that moment. And I think I did the best I could, you know?

GQ: This uncomfortable level of intimacy must take extreme courage. Have there been live shows in the past where the interaction between you and the audience is almost freeing?

HF: That’s taken a really long time for me to find, but I’m really grateful that most Circuit des Yeux shows are exactly like you say – this very gorgeous, quiet meeting of souls, where you can hear a pin drop. I feel really empowered by that. But I’ve been doing this for almost 15 years, and for the first ten years I would get death threats all the time. People have such a visceral reaction to my voice when I’ve opened for bands and put myself out there. I have definitely had a mix of feedback.

GQ: For -io, you devised beautiful, orchestral arrangements with multiple musicians. How did you manage collaboration during the time of Covid?

HF: It was extremely challenging. Everything about making this record was challenging, but that’s not to say it wasn’t worth it. I wrote most of these arrangements as sheet music, which is something that’s new to me. I single-handedly produced it and arranged it, which I haven’t done in ten years.

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Final Third: In Conversation I live in Chicago, and I generally have a very bustling and collaborative existence. But in the last 18 months my whole music community has vanished. I was really isolated, not only just by the pandemic but also by compound loss and grief. So, once the record was completed, and demoed, folding people into that process was lengthy and detail-oriented – with a lot of consent. There was a core band of four people: Tyler, Andrew, Whitney and myself. We met up first to flesh out certain things and make sure certain things worked. There was no vaccine then, so we were masking up and doing our best. We were really afraid. There were hardly any rehearsals for the ensemble. And that was the scariest part. I was working with a lot of new people.

I’d never arranged for that size of an ensemble. So the fact it all worked out really feels like a miracle.

GQ: Looking back, do you wish you had access to other creative input?

HF: Part of me wishes I had had some help. I single-handedly picked every musician, wrote every note, and then mixed it remotely, which was very tough for me. At one point, I felt I was poisoning myself with this music. That’s when I knew I had to finish it.

GQ: You’ve been quoted as saying -io is a place where everything is ending all the time.

HF: I hope people can utilise the record as a place to go somewhere and feel something, and leave it behind... It is a place where the sky is perpetual sunset, in this burnt orange glow, where you can’t hold onto anything. So it does feel like a

70

freefall all the time. It feels urban, and not naturalistic. It feels like there’s blades and reflections and skyscrapers.

GQ: I can really feel it being urban and human-centred, but at the same time, there are references to nature scattered throughout: the snow, the wind, the ground as it shakes. What do you see as the record’s beating heart?

HF: Salvation. I dissociate a lot of my life, and I think these naturalistic elements grabbed me and tethered me to this reality. I think I saved myself with this music. And I think people can save themselves. It’s just a matter of knowing that you have the capacity. I also think life is suffering, but it doesn’t have to be a dark sentiment. Like, once you understand life is suffering, every moment that you’re not suffering is a bonus, you know?

GQ: I was really drawn to the kind of ascension moment in the middle of ‘Neutron Star’ where you sing of an atrophied astronomy, followed by the birth of the neutron star. You couple this process of decaying or atrophy with the jubilant birth of the star. How does this dynamic of birth and death and other natural cycles factor into your thinking?

HF: It’s hard for me to see it as a cycle. It feels like a one-way street. When dealing with grief and loss, you never get used to it because each loss is unique. I’ve recognised how gravity is kind of God in our reality. I lost a lot of people to gravity the last few years in different ways.

GQ: Is that how you began researching physics… and black holes?

HF: Yeah. I was researching gravity, and then I found my way into black holes – the ultimate gravitational pull. I guess I saw myself in it. I saw some people that I lost in it. The neutron star is this extremely dense ball of gas. It is the precipice of becoming a black hole. So it is actually an implosion that happens, but right before there’s this implosion, there is this gigantic, heavy mass.

Something about that really spoke to how I feel as someone who struggles with mental health and has lost people I love to suicide, which is seen as the ultimate darkness in Western society. By reinterpreting that through laws of physics – not only in my heart and in poetry, but also in quantum reality – these heavy moments of implosion have potential to become something better. They can release you from the weight. It takes a lot of bravery.

GQ: Is there a part of you that wishes you weren’t tethered to this reality, owing to gravity or otherwise?

HF: All the time. Since my waking life, I have fantasised about being somewhere else. I have this internal desire to keep running, and through this pandemic I had nowhere to go. For some reason, reaching out to other elements had felt like progress in my life. But through the last couple of years, I’ve realised there is nowhere to go. I’ve done a lot of internal work through therapy and other resources. Music has always taken me to the place I want to go. But now I am trying to augment my reactiveness and sit with myself and celebrate myself, as well as consider the world around me. And take care of it.

GQ: I notice in your listening guide to -io you advise listeners to take a break after track 5 or 6. How did you envision the narrative arc of the album?

Final Third: In Conversation

“I fell from the rooftop of a building.

It was about nine feet freefall. The action was really important to me”

71

Final Third: In Conversation HF: It is my longest Circuit des Yeux record by like 15 minutes and my compositions are really dense. In the past, I have felt like my records were a movie – almost like each sonic song was leaning on the one before or after, and they kind of coexisted. But upon reaching the completion of this record I realised that it’s so big and dense. It’s like a 15-layer German chocolate cake or like Ulysses, or some huge book; where you could eat the whole cake, or you could try to finish the book in one setting, but you’ll get sick from it. And that’s when I recognised that each song really stands on its own, and feels like a chapter. The songs are all so dense and all so fully encompassed within themselves, that they could act as their own sort of ‘mini worlds’.

GQ: I read recently about the psychology of rituals in overcoming loss – the way people who are grieving perform rituals in order to restore broken order. They can be public, or private rituals, like playing a song or planting something. Did you find comfort in rituals and their regularity?

HF: That has been the most challenging part about these last few months: not being able to congregate in the wake of loss. The cycle feels incomplete, unresolved. And, you know, I went to the funeral, I went to the Zoom wake, I went to the vigil, the socially-distanced thing. I don’t know if I found any habits that really helped me complete that process. I’m still waiting to see people in real life to do that. In terms of improving my mental health, I read. Pema Chödrön is a Buddhist teacher and how speaks about grief has been very helpful for me.

GQ: I read recently about how making the album was an exercise of relieving yourself of resurfacing darkness.

HF: Music is so magical. For a really long time, I thought it saved my life. Looking back, I realised it was me who saved my life. But it is the largest tool in my life, not only for communicating, but healing. With this record, I was bedridden, writing these scores out on my computer, or sulking and getting myself to this organ, just so I could sit in the sun. These are very, very small acts of energy and creation. All this was really intertwined with my depression in a way which it hasn’t been for a very long time.

GQ: Did you learn anything about yourself during that time?

HF: Absolutely, I am a totally different person now to who I was when I started making the record – quantum growth – to the point that I find presenting myself to people who are familiar with me a little awkward.

GQ: You’ve just unveiled the music video for ‘Sculpting the Exodus’, which plays out the scene from your album artwork as well. Am I right in thinking you actually flung yourself off a building in the process?

HF: I fell from the rooftop of a building. It was about nine feet freefall. The action was really important to me. And it was awesome that Matador were so open-minded about it when I first brought it to the table. They were like: “Why don’t we do a green screen?” I said: “You don’t understand – this is about me experiencing something and capturing it on film.” [Matador] found a stunt person for me to train with and I trained with Talin Chat who is this incredible stuntman, known for The Mandalorian.

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GQ: What was that like? Were you scared?

HF: It was such an incredible experience, as someone with PTSD and depression. I wanted to experience the feeling of falling and see if it matched the way I feel often in my existence.

It was not what I expected. I fell about 50 times. It did not get easier with each fall; in fact, it became harder. My body memorised the impact that was coming, and it became stiffer. I could feel the fear the more times I jumped. It reminds me of ageing and being conscious of your softness. It’s fucking hard to come back around to major depression and be like, “God dammit, it is my brain. This whole time I thought it was something else and I was doing good.” And then you’re falling again. This recognition of knowing yourself and knowing what you need is painful.

GQ: Do you think you could do it again?

HF: No... I mean, theoretically, yes. I can. But I was so sore, it completely depleted me. I love pushing my body to the limit. I think it’s such a gorgeous act of devotion. I don’t think we see enough female characters doing that in the public eye.

I want the World’s Strongest Man competition, but they’re singing opera.

GQ: What do you have planned for the future? A tour?

HF: The album is a beast. She is so big, and there’re so many parts. We’re working toward a show in New York on the album release date, October 22. We’ll be doing one in Chicago on November 21. I’ll be coming to Europe and the UK, hopefully in April. All of the shows will have an orchestral appendage – five to ten string players – with our core group, so it’s gonna be huge and adventurous.

GQ: What do you hope people take from the album?

HF: Frankly, anything. I hope they can find a safe place to experience their feelings and feel validated. I hope they can walk away and feel more open and able to interact with the world.

Music helps people travel. Music is a utility; you can go there, and you can leave things there. I’ll never forget the way music helped me through my first mental health crisis, and it helped me again this time.

– SAMARITANS (116 123) operates a 24-hour helpline available every day of the year. Alternatively, you can email Samaritans at jo@samaritans.org.

MIND (0300 123 3393) operates Monday to Friday, 9am to 6pm.

It promotes the views and needs of people with mental health problems.

SANE (0300 304 7000) offers emotional support, information and guidance for people affected by mental illness, their families and carers, daily, 4.30pm to 10.30pm.

The New Album Out 22nd October

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LIVE SHOWS ARE BACK!

And they have a new home by the river

LIVE MUSIC ● STAND UP ● CABARET ● DANCE ● THEATRE ● TALKS ● FAMILY EVENTS ● ●

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FROM THE ROYAL BOROUGH OF GREENWICH, FOR EVERYONE

Final Third: The Rates

Mary Lattimore Each issue we ask an artist or group to share three musicians they think have gone under appreciated, and three new names who they hope will avoid a similar fate. Harpist Mary Lattimore discussed her list with Max Pilley

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Final Third: The Rates Mary Lattimore has established herself at the centre of the alternative music community with the same quiet and delicate grace that elevates each of her four albums to date. The composer and harpist, now settled in Los Angeles, understands the restorative capacity of her chosen instrument whilst also knowing how to sidestep the tired angel-at-the-pearly-gates clichés that burden its commonest cultural associations.

Listening to Lattimore’s music brings you closer to the earth than the heavens, her beautifully observed and effortlessly natural writing seeming to mirror the intricate majesty of our organic world. Far from a classical purist, she seeks new palettes for the harp to explore, whether in conjunction with other unlikely instrumentation or augmented with electronic experimentation.

Born in North Carolina, Lattimore spent over a decade immersed in the Philadelphia music community, forming personal and working relationships with artists including Kurt Vile, Jeff Zeigler and The War on Drugs. Alongside her solo albums, she has become a highly sought-after collaborator too, appearing alongside Jarvis Cocker, Thurston Moore and Julianna Barwick, among many others.

Now, with her latest record Collected Pieces II, a compilation of obscurities and unreleased material, being released on October 29 via Ghostly International, we asked her to guide us through six artists that she feels are still awaiting their due.

With typical modesty, she did not need much convincing, starting with her three newer names.

NAILAH HUNTER

“People that say, ‘I only like to listen to music that makes me happy or joyful,’ I just can’t relate. Aliens!”

She is also Los Angeles-based and so I kept seeing her name pop up in ambient music circles around here. She is a harpist, so of course finding out that she plays the harp was really exciting, and so she and I became friends. I have a lot of friends that play the harp, just from being in that world for so many years, but I feel like she is definitely one who has a similar aesthetic to mine. She has similar music tastes and just her way of playing is very similar to the way that I see the harp. Aside from playing the harp beautifully, she also has this crazily amazing voice and the way she pairs her voice with the harp is just heavenly. I would definitely encourage people to check her out. Her EP Spells came out last year and just blew me away.

During lockdown, I had a few concerts in my yard, just very small concerts in the front yard, and I didn’t invite many people to play but I thought it would be just gorgeous to hear her in person, because I’d only seen her live once, and it was just magical. I love people who are taking the harp into different contexts like that, really exploring with it.

When you say you feel she has a similar aesthetic to you as a harpist, could you explain that? I think a lot of us don’t know too much about the harp.

I feel like her use of pedals, taking it into a more affected plane, exploring the sounds of the harp with synthesisers is kind of similar to what I like to do. Just seeing the potential of using electronics with the instrument and creating a palette that has a lot of soft colours. She’s amazing.

Is there a harpist social network out there somewhere? Do you guys all hang out online?

Sort of, I guess so! It’s so nerdy to say. When you play an instrument that isn’t played so often, it’s like we have to kind of stick together. It’s also a cumbersome instrument, there are problems that other musicians might not be able to relate to.

Like, when you see tons of flights of stairs at a venue and your heart just sinks, or if it’s really hot and you’ve been asked to play outside and you have to think about the wood of the harp, things like that. It’s kind of fun to commiserate with other harpists and share tips.

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Final Third: The Rates ALEX SOMERS Alex is one of my close friends here as well, we got to know each other through Julianna Barwick. He is an amazing musician.

I have been listening to the two records he put out earlier this year, Siblings and Siblings 2. These are his first solo records, but he has been involved in the Sigur Ros world and Riceboy Sleeps, and he is also a very accomplished film composer [his credits include Black Mirror, Captain Fantastic and Honey Boy]. I really encourage people to check out these two new records, gorgeous and exquisite.

I think a lot of people will be familiar with Sigur Ros and with Somers’ work as half of Jónsi & Alex. How would you say these new records compare to those?

It’s in a similar place, but I would say Alex’s music reminds me of breathing. It has this fragility and pulsing to it that I just find hits you in a very quiet way. He’s a producer and his ears are so attuned to the world. The way he listens is very particular and nuanced. He’s thought about every single moment on these records, it’s very intentional and thoughtful.

MYRIAM GENDRON She’s a French-Canadian singer and songwriter and I really, really loved her debut record, which was all songs which she had made from Dorothy Parker poems. She just has this plaintive, plain, simple, beautiful folk voice and plays the guitar.

The record was called Not So Deep as a Well and it was just the most enchanting, simple, sad, beautiful music. She has a new record coming out soon and I’m really looking forward to it. I’ve never seen her perform but we have mutual friends and I would really love to see her play live. Simple is the word, but a beautiful simple. Heart-wrenching songs.

My friend Bill Nace turned me onto it. Her record came out on Feeding Tube Records and they’re based in Northampton, Massachusetts and I was hanging out there a lot at one point.

That’s how it came to my attention and it’s a record I listened to so, so many times.

Does it ever wind you up when people ask you why you enjoy ‘sad’ music?

I don’t really have many people that ask me that! I only really hang out with people that have a little bit of melancholia in there and love listening to sad music. I would say that about the people that like to listen to my music, too, so I don’t really encounter many people that say, ‘I only like to listen to music that makes me happy or joyful’. I just can’t relate. Aliens!

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OUT TO SEA This is a really close friend of mine, Steven Urgo. He and I both lived in Philadelphia in the same neighbourhood for many, many years and although we were friends in the same music community, we didn’t really get to hang out one-on-one so much until we both moved to LA at the same time. Steven is a great, great drummer, but this is his first project where he has written the songs and he’s singing. His record came out earlier this year and I played on it and I feel like it’s just great songwriting, a solid record. It’s out on Bandcamp, I think he’s looking for a label.

He’s played with lots of bands [including The War On Drugs] as a drummer but this is his first real foray into being the band. He’s had it in him, but sometimes it takes a while to get the confidence to actually make the thing and release it. It’s great, what he’s made.

It sometimes feels like everybody in Philadelphia has had a spell as a member of The War on Drugs, just like The Fall in Manchester. Is Philly as tight a musical community as it seems?

Final Third: The Rates ROSALI Definitely, yeah. Especially around that time. I mean, I’m sure it is now, with different people also coming into the mix and new people arriving, but back then when The War on Drugs, Kurt Vile and I were all living there in the same neighbourhood, that place felt very vibrant and rich with music, and Steven was also part of that. It’s a great music city. My heart is still there, I really love Philly. It was very, very hard to leave, I lived there for thirteen years and I still miss it every day.

I thought for a moment you had chosen Rosalía, who is great but maybe wouldn’t quite qualify as an under-represented artist.

Ha, yeah, I put all my friends on here – Nailah Hunter, Myriam Gendron, Rosalía…

In fact, of course, we are talking about the singer/songwriter Rosali. Introduce her to us?

She is another close friend, also with a Philadelphia background, she and I were roommates in Philly. This is her third record, so I guess I would consider her on the more established part of the list, but she just has this very cool, beautiful voice.

Her newest record is called No Medium and it came out earlier this year and it has a backing band, The David Nance Group from Nebraska, and it is folky with a little bit of a country sound.

She’s just such a great songwriter, it makes me so happy to see her doing so well.

And can we safely assume that Rosali served her stint as a member of The War on Drugs?

No, but she has had members of The War on Drugs play on her records!

GUN OUTFIT I put a lot of friends on these lists, just because that’s what I’ve been listening to, especially during lockdown. It’s been a way to connect with them when we couldn’t physically be in the same rooms. Gun Outfit are buddies of mine, we live in the same neighbourhood and I’ve loved their music for a while now. I find it to be so cosy and comforting to me. I’ve heard it described as cosmic country. I don’t know that I would really say that, but it’s really fun. I look forward to seeing them live again when this Covid stuff is over.

When they first broke through in the late 2000s, they were often associated with Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth and scuzzy rock bands like those, but as the years have gone by they’ve mellowed out a little. I wonder if that has something to do with having moved to LA? Maybe so. I dunno, California is a pretty laid back place to live! But then again they moved here from Olympia, Washington and that’s already pretty chilled too, so who knows.

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Final Third: My Place

The sunlight reveals the image Exploring the miniature world of Orlando Weeks, by Luke Cartledge.

Photography by Tom Porter

In a tiny, second-floor room in South London, Orlando Weeks has built himself a miniature world. A narrow space at the top of the house he shares with his partner and their son, it has the feel of a particularly creative teenager’s bedroom: posters, books and trinkets line every wall, with pieces of clothing hanging on the door and a small desk providing a studious focal point. This is the place he comes to write, print, stamp, draw and think.

Since the dissolution of his much-loved indie band The Maccabees in 2017, Weeks has barely paused. In 2018, he published his first book, The Gritterman, the story of an elderly council worker reluctantly entering retirement; as well as writing the book, he illustrated it himself and produced an accompanying album and one-off live show. His debut solo album proper, A Quickening, followed in 2020, and its successor, Hop Up, is set for release in January; he’s also composed a new soundtrack for the National Theatre adaptation of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 1998 film After Life, and is currently working on a new animation project for the Hepworth Museum. All of this begins, develops, and sometimes ends in this room of a few square metres.

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“I suppose it’s just nice being busy, having lots to do,” he says, and notes that the amount of work he manages to accomplish comes partly from his own desire to be invested in every part of the creative process. “In my experience, if you start being hands on with stuff, one thing rolls into the next and informs your next decision, making stuff, and if you’re able to do that quickly and move with a good idea, then you can just keep going through it.

“Part of what made The Maccabees good was that it went through those filters – everything had to be a consensus. But now I don’t have those filters, or those other opinions; for better or worse I can move quicker and keep the next process. And I still haven’t got tired of it. With live shows, I really enjoy setting everything up and being way more involved from the moment you arrive at the venue to when you leave the venue. It’s a much happier place for me, because you feel that the whole day is the investment, and not just the hour-and-a-half on stage.” The array of objects in this room is a testament to this enthusiasm for process and exacting attitude to detail. It’s a space that’s been invested in wholly, and Weeks was only too happy to talk us through his creative base.

Final Third: My Place The Gritterman miniature town I feel bad because what I’m going to do is make it into a glass-top table, and it’d sit underneath it, but I’ve not got to it yet. It was made by some fans of The Gritterman; I saw it on Instagram and I bought it from them, because I loved it. You can plug it in and it turns on all the lights in the buildings, and when you do that it’s real magic. I still can’t really fathom it – they just really liked the book and built an entire miniature world of it.

They’re called Postcard Models; they now do this for a living but this was one of the first things they made. It’s got every site from the book in there: the graveyard, the police station, the snooker hall. It’s beautiful.

Lino prints This is the artwork for the new record. And I’m trying to think…

I’ve been trying to figure out how to make something that will be like a special giveaway for people. I guess like a prize draw or something like that. For those Hop Up prints, I’ve been printing with lino onto cyanotype, and I think that’s how I’m going to do it.

But this one here is straight onto the cyanotype.

If you don’t know how cyanotype works, the sunlight reveals the image. So you’d lay stuff onto the paper and it’d show through; I’ve been slowly trying to finesse all these different things.

Postcards I like the colours of these. I think that’s a Reynolds stone wood carving; that is by someone called Lily – she’s a Swiss etcher and vinyl cutter. I think that’s Apollo’s head. And I like the plinth on the other one. But they change all the time. My mum collects postcards and I’ve picked that up off her. I keep changing them to have something different in front of me.

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Final Third: My Place

Kagoule and sliders This is another thing from the last video. The double kagoule is made by a guy called Daniel W. Fletcher, and the flip-flops – or sliders, whatever they’re called – are by me. I stayed up way too late making those and we didn’t even use them. I traced the writing on, and painted it all… and it took bloody ages.

Traction engine drawing and cork t-shirt That’s the traction engine my grandad restored. He was the inspiration for The Gritterman, and I like how the drawing was done by someone called Wheeler. Something about that felt fitting.

This t-shirt is by a friend from my art foundation. He was obsessed with cork, and everything he did was about cork. I’ve always loved how that looks, over the top of an old Nike t-shirt. So when we made merch for the A Quickening tour, we did a similar thing.

David Attenborough-signed t-shirt This is my David Attenborough-signed monkey t-shirt. I went to a talk he gave with Melvyn Bragg at the Brighton Centre. They showed Attenborough’s best ten clips or something from his career, with this huge screen and Melvyn Bragg and him just talking. I bought that and his biography; it was so good, and I tried to speak to him, to say more than just ‘hello’, but he had a lot of other people queuing, probably with monkey t-shirts too. But he was very polite.

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Final Third: My Place Dog race I got this when the Macs were on tour with Florence, in America.

I can’t remember where we were, but that was in the dressing room and I couldn’t get over it, and they shipped it back with all their gear. It’s the heaviest thing you’ve ever tried to lift, so it probably added hundreds of quid onto their shipping costs.

I feel like touring in the States, especially with someone as big as Flo, you’re playing venues that are like somewhere out in a car park, not really anything to do with a city – just a dome and a car park. Some of them stick out – like we played the Hollywood Bowl with her, and that stuck out – but it’d be such a guess if I tried to remember where this was from.

I change my mind about whether I want to have it around.

But I can’t not have it, you know?

Especially after it’s come such a long way. “Even dogs go to heaven in a race.” Something to mull over for you.

Guitar, synthesizer, megaphone The megaphone is in the video for ‘Deep Down Way Out’. I guess I premiered ‘Deep Down’ and ‘Big Skies, Silly Faces’ with the BBC Concert Orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall, and I used a megaphone there. I thought it might be just a good prop, but it sounded good. Arcade Fire always use them, and the Flaming Lips; I feel like that’s a good heritage that I hope to follow.

I tend to have a functional relationship with instruments.

I think Hugo [White, Maccabees guitarist] found me this guitar, and it’s just nice and slim. I’ve had it for a long time. And this keyboard: when we lived in Berlin, my friend who works at Roland told me there’s a Roland shop there and he sorted me out with this. And then we moved to Lisbon and it came with us, and back to the UK. I don’t really want another one, I’d feel sad. I’d rather fix this one.

“I tried to speak to David Attenborough but he had a lot of other people queuing, probably with monkey t-shirts too” Stamps I’m not technical at all. One of the things I like about making stamps or prints or books is that it’s very basic, very analogue.

The whole process, from drawing to making things, is very straightforward. Say with stamp-making, it channels your attention and focuses you really nicely, because you’re using tools, and getting a gouge in your thumb with one of those is no fun.

I’m a lot quicker learning to use stuff with my hands than I would be at, like, coding. I still just do really basic music production. I can’t tell whether I really think that it’s the best way for me to work or if I’m too lazy to try and get better at some of those things. Maybe I’ll just leave that sort of floating in the air. But even back when I was at art school, I was doing lots of this kind of thing, with as little technical requirement as possible.

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Ever since he was born in North London in 1908, Rod Stewart has been a proud Scotsman who is widely considered the sixth best member of ’70s five-piece the Faces.

He’s stubbornly released 31 albums so far, and, rightly or wrongly, has decided that another one won’t hurt.

Rod and I have something of a complicated relationship – a mutual disrespect, I like to call it, whereby I have been vocal on my feelings about him in the past and he’s shot back by never acknowledging my comments or existence. I am nothing if not professional, though, and have parked my personal opinions of the man who dropped his trousers in a members’ nightclub in 2019 (aged 74) and punched a bouncer on New Year’s Eve the following year.

I think Rod (who is 5ft 3 tall) would be the first to admit that there are issues here, not least in the double sized R, which fails on account of Stewart beginning with an S. But there are some new ideas here too. Previous Rod Rstewart albums have featured him sitting on a chair backwards and sitting on a chair forwards, but most of them are simply Rod in a suit with a tie on, a tie off, or a tie halfway between the two, ready to shag. For this album, he’s mixed it up with a military jacket, in a nod to his favourite contemporary band, The Libertines, and to his service in World War One. He’s also found a classy way to remind fans that he supports Celtic (a club local to him as a boy by 400 miles) even when he’s not talking, with a necklace inspired by Millie from Love Island. Rod may or may not be wearing trousers, but I suspect not. My Moriarty!

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Game, Set, Shit The Babolat Pure Drive is extremely light and looks v stylist but I’m disappointed to say I’ve come across all sorts of problems when using it!!! The very first time I tried to serve with it it slipped clean out of my hand. The second time I missed the ball completely. Since then, it’s manage to hit the ball occasionally (1 in 3 would be me being generous to the racket!), but often with the frame rather than the strings. I can count on one hand the amount of times the Babolat has gotten the ball over the net: 0. It must be an alignment issue – a problem I was hoping only applied to the Wilson brand, hence me switching to Babolat. Avoid!

VIP Abba tickets available where Andy Serkis will ‘play you’ so you don’t have to attend the show

illustration by kate prior

New relea s es for 2021 THE OSCILLATION ‘Untold Futures’ All Time Low LP/LP Ltd / CD

LA LUZ ‘La Luz’

Hardly Art LP/CD/MC

BLACKWATER HOLYLIGHT ‘Silence / Motion’ Riding Easy LP / CD

GUIDED BY VOICES ‘It’s Not Them. It Couldn’t Be Them. It Is Them’ Guided By Voices Inc. LP/CD

DOHNAVÙR ‘The Flow Across Borders’

HOWLIN’ RAIN ‘The Dharma Wheel’

Castles In Space LP Coloured

LALA LALA ‘I Want The Door To Open’ Hardly Art LP/CD/MC

Silver Current Records LP / LP Ltd / CD

DAVID GRUBBS & RYLEY WALKER ‘ A Tap On The Shoulder’’

STATIC ‘Toothpaste & Pills: Demos & Live ‘78-‘80’ Third Man Records LP

NOLAN POTTER ‘Music Is Dead’ Castle Face LP / LP Ltd / CD

Husky Pants LP / CD

MAGIC ROUNDABOUT ‘Up’ Third Man Records LP

OUZO BAZOOKA ‘Dalya’

Stolen Body LP / LP Ltd / CD

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Sat 2 Oct Balimaya Project + Colectiva Sat 16 Oct Clark with the London Contemporary Orchestra

Sat 6 Nov Christian Löffler Fri 12 Nov Archie Shepp & Jason Moran: Let My People Go

Sat 20 Nov Mon 18 Oct Speakers Corner Quartet: Charles Lloyd Further Out Than The Edge + Nérija Sat 4 Dec Alfa Mist

Sun 1 Nov Matthew Halsall

Sun 30 Jan Klein

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Featuring Sampha, Kae Tempest, Tirzah, Mica Levi, Coby Sey, Joe Armon-Jones, Lafawndah and more