Zero pounds / Volume 03 / Issue 67 / the alternatIVe musIc tabloId

Chromatics The complete independence of Johnny Jewel

Plus Holly Herndon | Anton Newcombe | Sauna Youth | Luke Haines

Du Blonde | Bill Wells & Aidan Moffatt

loudandquiet.com 4

cover photography

ruth radelet

Zero pounds / Volume 03 / Issue 67 / the alternatIVe musIc tabloId

Chromatics The complete independence of Johnny Jewel

Plus Holly Herndon | Anton Newcombe | Sauna Youth | Luke Haines

Du Blonde | Bill Wells & Aidan Moffatt

contributors

amy pettifer, austin laike, chris Watkeys, daisy jones, david zammitt, daniel dylan-Wray, dan kendall, danny canter, elinor jones, edgar smith, frankie nazardo, jack doherty, james f. thompson, james West, janine bullman, jenna foxton, joe goggins, josh sunth, lee bullman, gabriel green, gem harris, mandy drake, nathan Westley, oWen richards, phil sharp, reef younis, sam cornforth, samuel ballard, sam Walton, tim cochrane, thomas may, tom fenWick

contents welcome

In the end we went with ‘Chromatics’ to emblazon our front cover this month, but it probably should read ‘Johnny Jewel’. Reef Younis’ interview with the 40-year-old Texan producer and musician began as a Chromatic article about the noir pop group’s forthcoming album ‘Dear Tommy’, which may or may not be out by the time you read this. But talk (in a Portland bar at 1am) inevitably sidled up to Jewel’s other concerns also – his similarly slinking electronic acts Glass Candy, Desire and Symmetry; his film score work; his move from Montreal to Los Angeles; his record label, Italians Do It Better; the dogged protection of his complete independence – especially that. Also, it’s pretty hard to discuss someone’s new album with them when you’ve not heard it.

‘Dear Tommy’, we were told, is not ready, and I imagine that when it is we’ll all hear it together, plonked on Soundcloud without a care for industry or market niceties. It worked for ‘Kill For Love’ in 2012, and is emblematic of how Jewel does business as a man only accountable to and dependent on himself. It’s what I find so fascinating about him and why we’ve been chasing an interview with Jewel for three years. We nearly managed it at Primavera Sound in 2013, when he played the festival with Glass Candy, but the trail went cold and I got distracted by the sea.

It’s not helped that Jewel doesn’t employ a publicity team here in the UK or even at home in the States. As a man who doesn’t give many interviews he hardly needs one, and who’s going to tell him he has to do otherwise? His label? That’s him too. Jewel does everything himself, or with the help of a handful of friends who double up as work colleagues – his manager Alexis, whose been our point of contact; Chromatic singer Ruth Radelet, who supplied us with photographs. Again, I like that, but for the artistic admiration I’m glad there’s only one Johnny Jewel out there.Stuart Stubbs

contact

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loud and quietpo box 67915londonnW1W 8th

editor - stuart stubbsart director - lee belchersub editor - alex Wilshirefilm editor - andreW andersonbook editors - lee & janine bullman

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this month l&q loves

alexis rivera, alix Wenmouth, annette lee, sean neWsham, steve phillips, Will laurence.

the vieWs expressed in loud and quiet are those of the respective contributors and do not necessari ly reflect the opinions of the magazine or its staff. all rights reserved 2015 loud and quiet ltd.

issn 2049-9892 printed by sharman & company ltd.distributed by loud and quiet ltd. & forte

Anton newcombe – 12

luke hAines – 16

holly herndon – 18

sAunA youth – 22

du blonde – 24

bill wells And AidAn moffAt – 26

johnny jewel – 28

loudandquiet.com 7

1 0 Years of Loud and Quiet

Faris: I remember just before I moved to London Tom said: “When we leave school, we’re going to start a garage band and all wear black.” You don’t need anything more than that when you’re starting off. We were a gang and the shows were raw and aggressive… even when we played at the Rhythm Factory with one person in the audience.

Rhys: We started playing together and booked a show at Faris’ and Tom’s old club night for two weeks later. We were kind of making it up as we went along, but at every gig we played someone would book us for a follow up show so we just went with it. It hasn’t really stopped since. We only had a handful of songs, including two or three covers but that was fine. We thought 15 minutes was the perfect time for a burst of horrible noise. It still is. Gigs get boring after half an hour.

The shortest show we played was probably about 10 minutes. That would have been us playing the full set at double speed because we were all on speed. I was talking about that with Faris last night. Those shows were a lot of fun. It could have been about seven minutes actually.

Faris: I had a tendency to sing everything twice as fast on top of that. I tried everything to slow down including writing “SLOW DOWN” on my arm.

The shows were so intense and such a release of energy I don’t think it really mattered. Some of them were really violent and destructive, both from our side and the audience’s. One Halloween show in Brooklyn was particularly bad in that sense… We didn’t really have any regard for consequence in general but also I don’t think we really put any consideration into how we came across. It was a

primal release driven by adrenaline and there’s nothing like letting yourself cross the line like that.

We all loved the shows that wound people up. I think the support shows with the Arctic Monkeys were the best example of that – people throwing anything they could (their phones, lighters, heated coins, an aeroplane seatbelt, bottles) and punching the people who were cheering.

Rhys: We didn’t want everyone to like it, but I think our appeal was that it was genuinely exciting, even if it was just about listening to a heavy racket for 15 minutes, dressing up, pissing people off and going crazy. That’s what music should be about anyway.

Our only goal was to release a scrappy and limited 45 at some point, but ‘Strange House’ was definitely the beginning of a journey. I think it’s got some great tunes on it and was quite adventurous in places. I wish it was a bit closer to the live experience. We don’t really play much from it any more but have someone in the crowd shouting “Play Sheena!” or “Jack The Ripper!” at every gig.

Faris: The production could have been more extreme and closer to our live sound, I guess. It’s not perfect but I hope we never make a perfect record. I think if I made something I was completely happy with I’d probably quit.

Rhys: I think it’s really hard for new groups to break through now, but I think we would have still made a splash [if we were just getting started]. It was genuinely something different, not a million miles away from The Fat White Family, for example, and they’re doing pretty well at the moment. They’re probably better musicians then we were at the time but the energy is the same.

There was always a close knit community back then – we all played together, hung out and had loads of fun. Bands like Neil’s Children, The Violets, Twisted Charm, Xerox Teens. It’s kind of the same now with our mates Toy, Telegram and The Voyeurs.

My lasting memory of 2005 is our first gig at The Spread Eagle on Kingsland Road and the early rehearsals, which felt so exciting. The first one was a sweltering summers Sunday. It had been Junk Club the night before so we all got the train up together from Southend having had no sleep at all. It was in The Pistols’ old Denmark Street rehearsal space, which doesn’t even exist any more. I don’t think we would have guessed that we’d be recording our fifth album ten years later but it definitely felt like something good was happening. We never took anything too seriously. Every step after was a bigger one but we didn’t really know what was going on to be honest. We were learning as we went.

Faris: For me it was The Junk Weekender in Southend – seeing peroxide-goth transvestite Mika Doll jumping up and down at the window of the Royal Hotel, freaking out all the high-street shoppers. Piling all our gear and ourselves into Joe’s Fiat and driving in the bus lanes, getting fined, not paying the fines. Tom having long hair. Rhys turning up late for rehearsal. Josh’s Captain Beefheart impression at our first rehearsal – the last time he was allowed near a microphone. Josh thinking the engineer was joking when he wanted paying for recording our first demo.

It happened very quickly but it also immediately felt like I didn’t want to spend my time doing anything else. It didn’t feel like I had a choice. I think we all felt like that.

Ten years ago few thought The Horrors would be the most enduring band of 2005. Weren’t they just a fad? The New York Dolls reincarnate? Evidently not. Today they write songs that are longer than their entire live show was back then, as Faris Badwan and Rhys Webb remember

did i Love 2005?

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loudandquiet.com 8

books + second l ife

Café assassin by MiChael stewart

blueMoose

andy warhol: the CoMplete CoMMissioned reCord Covers by paul MerChal

prestel

original roCkers by riChard king

faber and faber

As the eighties were drawing to a close, best friends Nick and Andrew were enjoying a golden moment in their lives. They were dancing to the Cramps and getting fucked up on MDMA, crashing student parties and squeezing every last drop of life out of the night. One night though, something went badly wrong and someone died. Which meant that someone had to take the blame. Having spent twenty-two years in jail for a crime he didn’t commit, Nick Smith is out of prison, facing a brand new world and looking to Andrew, by now in possession of what appears to be a perfect life, to make things good. Café Assassin artfully explores love, friendship, guilt, innocence and revenge, and the constant pull the past exerts on the present.

Think of Andy Warhol and record covers and chances are that you’ll picture the Velvet Underground’s bright yellow, screen-printed banana, but there are more than a few surprises in store here. The artist famed for repetition and soup cans began life as a brush for hire. During the early period of his career Warhol was responsible for an astonishing array of beautiful, stylish and evocative album covers for everyone from Count Basie to Tennessee Williams, via Mozart, Blue Note and Thelonius Monk. The book’s generous format allows three decades worth of covers to be viewed in all their glory, ensuring that you’ll never look at Warhol the same way again.

Before downloads, file-sharing and online show-offs, the crucible of new music was the independent record shop. Rather than just flog vinyl, though, this network of dusty old establishments acted as counter cultural hubs where the tribes met, where everyday sounded different and where people spent eternities searching out the music that defined them. Richard King’s background – years behind the counter in Bristol’s Revolver Records – along with his infectious, unpretentious prose, mark this as a book that will appeal to anyone who’s ever spent time hunched over racks of records digging for treasure. No misty eyed memoir, Original Rockers is rather a paean to the visceral thrills that music lovers will recognize immediately.

by janine & lee bullMan

In David Lovering’s yearbook entry, he stated his three main ambitions were to be in a rock band, become an electrical engineer, and to tour with Rush. He didn’t get to do the latter but as the proud owner of an electronic engineering degree from the Wentworth Institute of Technology, and the longtime drummer for Pixies, two out of three is still a pretty solid return.

One interest, though, went unmentioned and ended up playing a pivotal part in his life. From electrified pickles and smoke ring-blowing bass drums to ‘shit-covered’ playing cards and Hydrostatics, David Lovering’s love affair with magic quickly took on a second life of its own.

Inspired by watching illusions and card tricks at the International Brotherhood of Magicians convention in the early 1990s, the magic bug bit hard, and Lovering used the intervening years between the Pixies’ split in 1993 and reformation in 2004 to develop his act.

Balancing his time between stints drumming for Cracker and Nitzer Ebb, and driving his fledgling magic career forward, The Scientific Phenomenalist (his magician stage name, of course) stepped up from a handful of birthday party performances to a performer’s membership

at the Magic Castle (a magic-oriented nightclub where he also established a residency as one third of ‘The Unholy Three’) and US tours opening for Frank Black and The Breeders.

Stepping out on stage in glasses, tie and lab coat, he might look like an unassuming secondary school chemistry teacher, but The Scientific Phenomenalist is not your standard Pontins magic show. Centred around the idea of ‘where science and magic collide’, his provocative and offbeat act combines easy-going adult humour of late-night stand up with curious, customised contraptions. Using his electronics degree, Lovering built and customised a series of props designed to help blur the lines between physics and magic, from the Luminescence Test where 120 volts are fired through a pickle until it glows, to the ‘Vortex Cannon’ – a bass drum filled with smoke that pounds out smoke rings into the audience.

Even as Pixies’ reunion gathered steam, Lovering stayed true to his magic, juggling touring with resident performances at Magic Castle on Friday nights. Sadly, with Pixies just edging past a decade in their second stint, Lovering has now hung up his lab coat as the skins have once again replaced the weird science.

reef younis investigates what rock stars do nextno.9: david lovering

/

A kind of Magic

loudandquiet.com 11

getting to know you

Eleven years ago Franz Ferdinand released ‘Take Me Out’ – the most danceable, perfect indie-pop single since ‘Psycho Killer’. Shortly

after its release in January 2004, Franz met ’70s art-pop duo Sparks and agreed to make an album with them. They finally got around to

forming FFS last year, with their debut LP due next month /

Alex kapranos

The best piece of advice you’ve been given Stop thinking about it so much.

Your favourite word Vicious. It’s wonderfully onomatopoeic, sounding like a stiletto slicing through flesh.

Your pet-hate Running my hand over a clean surface to discover that a jammy knife has rested there.

If you had to eat one food forever, it would be... Flapjacks.

The worst job you’ve had It started off as the best job I’d ever had. It was called Terror Under The Arches and I worked alongside a lot of out-of-work Gaelic TV actors and Satanist Goths in a sort of Haunted House theme show. I mainly played the part of a Chainsaw Wielding Maniac. I couldn’t believe my luck: I was getting paid ten quid an hour for this. It was a total laugh for the first couple of weeks, but the repetition really began to wear. We’d work shifts and were supposed to always fill the chainsaw with petrol for the next Chainsaw Wielding Maniac, but one day the previous guy hadn’t bothered. I pull on the chord. Nothing happened. The punters stared at me, perplexed, but definitely not scared. I dropped the saw and it was me who ran out of the room, never to return.

The film you can quote the most of Back to the Future.

Favourite place in the world Where the three glens meet.

Your style icon My granddad. He was a very well-dressed carpenter.

The one song you wished you’d written Anything by Satie.

The most famous person you’ve met Other than other musicians, Will Smith probably. He seemed alright

WhO WOuLd PLay yOu in a FiLM OF yOur LiFE?

LEnny hEnry. hE SEEMS LiKE a nicE guy.

The thing you’d rescue from a burning building My Telecaster Deluxe.

Your first big extravagance My Telecaster Deluxe. It was the first thing I’d ever bought on Ebay and bid on it when I was drunk for £666. It was more than I’d ever spent on anything in my life before and I couldn’t afford it, but it was worth it.

People’s biggest misconception about yourself That I am an extrovert.

Your biggest disappointment Realising that I was probably never going to travel through time except forwards, at the same rate as everyone else.

Your biggest fear Spiteful idiots with power and weapons.

The best book in the world What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver: it’s the pinnacle of succinctness.

Your hidden talent I can make my eyes spasm and vibrate violently. It looks pretty cool, but it gives me a headache for days afterwards.

What is success to you? Pulling the chord and there’s petrol in the proverbial tank.

What talent do you wish you had? I wish I was a better carpenter.

How would you like to die? Quickly, painlessly, unexpectedly and spectacularly in about sixty years time while addressing the UN. Again. But this time from space.

What is the most overrated thing in the world? The Royal Family.

What would you change about your physical appearance? I’ve never been able to grow proper sideburns, as there’s a gap between my beard and hairline. It irks me less now than it did as a teenager.

What’s your biggest turn-off? A stupid laugh.

What would you tell your 15-year-old self? Carry on, but get laid.

Your best piece of advice for others Be excellent to one another.

The worst date you’ve been on I took a girl to Dunkin Donuts. She wasn’t impressed.

Your guilty pleasure I don’t feel guilty about anything that brings me pleasure.

Your favourite item of clothing I made myself a pair of tweed trousers once. It took days. I’ve had them for about sixteen years and now only wear them on very special occasions.

loudandquiet.com 12

Alex Wisgard met the infamous head of the Brian Jonestown Massacre to let him do the talking

PhotograPhy: Phil sharP / writer: alex wisgard

anton newcombe

loudandquiet.com 13

Tell Me AbouT IT

“Am I boring the shit out of you or what?” Fresh off the plane in London from his home in Berlin, Anton Newcombe, the man behind twenty-five years of The Brian Jonestown Massacre, leans across the table and peers over his glasses. He cracks a smile. “I don’t care if everything else is like, 12-point type. I want this in, like, 72-point type: AM I BORING THE SHIT OUT OF YOU OR WHAT?”

We’re halfway through our conversation, and Anton has just explained his side of making the infamous documentary DiG! for what must be the thousandth time. An account of the so-called rivalry between the BJM and the Dandy Warhols, the 2004 film introduced the public at large to Anton Newcombe as a volatile, sociopathic junkie, with his head somewhere between the clouds and the past. Yet, to hear Newcombe tell it, everything about the film was a series of self-engineered subterfuges which would make Thomas Pynchon’s head ache: “In the beginning, I said, ‘We’re gonna have a revolution, and I’m gonna show you how to do it,’” he explains. “I wasn’t kidding. But all this other crap went to peoples’ heads.”

It’s a reputation that still dogs him today; when I tell one friend who I’m meeting, I get this response: “I would advise you to say something nice to everyone in your life before the interview.” Well, fuck that (sorry dude). Newcombe is affable, funny and visibly still excited by what he does, if clearly weary of doing press. Likewise, scratch even slightly below the surface presented by DiG!, and you’ll discover a plethora of incredible songs, sounds and styles.

BJM’s new album, ‘Musique de Film Imaginé’, is perfectly typical in its atypicalness: a collection of fourteen semi-ambient pieces, recorded in a post-tour itch (“I signed on to do a film soundtrack that got pushed back a whole year. I came off tour mentally wanting to be creative, and use that energy,”), inspired by French New Wave cinema, and featuring no vocals whatsoever from Newcombe himself. It’s a curious entry in the band’s ever-pulsating catalogue, with guest turns from Gallic chanteuse Soko (“I said ‘OK, [the song’s] in French. You have to do this for your culture.’ She said she’d never sang in French before. It’s so weird… She was really gracious,”) and Asia Argento – “It turned out Asia can’t really sing,” Newcombe confides, “she’s more of a personality” – which may alienate narrower-minded fans. That said, a collaborative LP with Tess Parks is due in June, and a “more straight-ahead BJM” double EP is coming out around August.

Newcombe is a big picture guy. He enthuses about all sorts of music, be it the “Turkish jams” of Erkin Koray, or Sleaford Mods (“It’s honest. I may not need to hear a hundred songs of it, but I like the song ‘Fizzy’, y’know? It’s funny, but it’s true.”). Newcombe has his hang-ups about popular culture but still believes revolution is possible; he may have a millennial’s yen for technology, but he’s still a sixties dreamer at heart. “In my life, I wanna collaborate with people and do interesting things,” he tells me near the end of our chat. “And this whole Babylon shit, right? We’ll call it Babylon, so all the brothers know. Just leave it to Babylon.”

“I’m really Interested In workIng In foreIgn languages”

On the EP that’ll be out in August, I have a song in Slovakian. I do sing in other languages, but this record that we’re talking about will probably be the last thing I do in French, because I don’t want it to seem like it’s a gimmick for me to work at the very lucrative market that I have there. It’s actually sincere, and I think it’s interesting that I don’t speak French. [My German] is horrible, but we live in an era where none of this stuff really matters, whether it’s me reaching out to communicate with people to collaborate – I have Google Translate. It’s trying to get the other people to express themselves, instead of pretending they’re in the Stone Roses to gain acceptance in England or something, like these bands do.

“there’s a thIng called dIscovery…”

... and that’s like, when you go to Spotify, and it says: “You might also like Led Zeppelin.” Well, think about how I’m doing this in all these different languages, to all these different cultures. And this will be for all time. See, my music’s for real. I’m the label. It’s never going to go away. So I have a record called ‘Who Killed Sgt. Pepper’ – it’s forever, because of Discovery, tied right next to ‘Sgt. Pepper…’ on iTunes.

But all these different languages, it all intersects in this cross-interconnectivity. It’s not necessarily for marketing, because it’s even more heavy to see it. I realise that no artist has really done this yet, and it’s interesting, as I mature, to do this. I realise I spent so many years doing conceptual art, just trying to write songs and battle my own insecurities

or whatever, and grow and learn and perform. But the next logical thing for me is to collaborate; there’s another kind of strength in that, because I’m so strong by myself. There’s two ways I could go; I could go to Nigel Godrich and just make one good record. I could do it easily. People would go: “Holy fuck, this guy can actually write better songs than Coldplay. He just had better words.” Or I could collaborate.

“In the edItIng of dIg!, what all these people are tryIng to say Is that I had all these opportunItIes and blew It”

Whether it’s Nina from Elektra… she doesn’t even have a job, and Elektra doesn’t exist. She didn’t see what I saw coming. Even people that we know of and respect, like Stereolab – the big menagerie is that they never sold; they had videos everywhere, but nothing like Drake or something.

“I took over that movIe”

Originally, it was about ten bands. William Morris Agency picked me up and they said to me: “Anton, these people are making this movie, and we’d love to get you into it.” And I just told them – those bands will break up. I’ve got a better idea: my mates will get a record deal, and they’re gonna go for it, and I’m never gonna change. So there you have night and day. I’ll set up a concert and you can meet my mates, and I’ll get the band. I got Courtney [Taylor-Taylor, Dandy Warhols frontman] his deal, because they were opening up for us.

So anyway, in the movie I said, this would be interesting, they’re all out on New Year’s Eve. And I wrote this song. OK they’re gonna come back here with the movie cameras after this fabulous blow-out party, right? And they’re gonna show poor, crazy Anton sleeping in a warehouse. So I said: “Ondi [Timoner, DiG! filmmaker], sit down, I’ll write a song in front of you, you can film it!” So I just re-recorded it – see, I knew all those parts, I’d just written it. I didn’t tell her that I’d just recorded a song, so I just played it, because I knew that it would be compelling in the movie.

“...then they dIdn’t have an endIng”

Long story short, it was picked up by VH1 networks, it was tested, and it tested the highest. They were gonna

make it a TV show, but they couldn’t show it because… y’know, the record company was sending hookers to try and get them to sign us – all this crazy stuff. Then Cary Woods, the producer who did stuff for Harmony Korine, he optioned the rights. Hollywood producer, the real deal, he was like: “We’re gonna make you the biggest star of your generation. But the thing is, we wanna own all your music.” I had my friend Tex with me, and I said: “Show ‘em what’s in your purse, Tex,” and she pulled out a handgun. And he just wigged, because I had all these girls dressed up in white. I was playing a game with the industry guys. I was trying to make it so it was too hot to handle, so they couldn’t steal it away from me.

“I would be Interested, If only for a second, to have a rap wIth russell brand”

Now that he has a documentary, because I’m curious – just between he and I – about possibly what his view on the situation is. Ondi is basically a liar. I’m not interested in talking to her, or slandering her more than that.

“I can show thIs to anybody else and go ‘hey, let’s work together’”

[Collaborating remotely via the internet] opened up a new possibility, because I wanted to work with people that… I could be in the studio, and they’re anywhere on the planet, so I could give directions and I know exactly what I want. I wouldn’t wanna work with Wayne Coyne, but somebody else would be great. Because a lot of people, for whatever reason, are like, “I’m not gonna go to the studio with that guy, he’s nuts or something.” Well this can completely defeat that. I do all this kind of stuff – I encourage people to come to Berlin, let’s make records, let’s do stuff.

“I was born In 1967”

To me, psychedelia really wasn’t the cartoons where everyone was wearing a paisley shirt and doing that Banana Splits fuzz stuff. To me, it was really when Brian Jones was playing dulcimer, cello, marimbas, every single instrument. It just keeps changing. And the Beatles did the same thing. Just on ‘Sgt. Pepper’ – it’s not their stupid clothes on the cover – it’s the fact they had sitar, British tea party jazz music of their parents’ era, and rock music, slow

loudandquiet.com 14

Tell Me AbouT IT

ballads; all these things in a kaleidoscopic vision. That, to me, is what it means. It’s not a fashion.

“God bless Alex MAAs And Austin Psych Fest”

It is interesting, because the revolution that I talked about did happen. Do you see how many bands are like us now? Liverpool Psych Fest, Austin Psych Fest – there were no bands like that, see what I’m saying? Now there’s a whole ocean – people are making indie stuff, doing it exactly this way all over the world. They see. But still people can’t wait to get famous – they can’t wait to pull a Noel Gallagher, but they can’t.

Even on my label, I don’t try to sign too many bands who are remotely like us, because I’m not trying to be like 4AD. Because some people do it so good, like Austin Psych Fest, Reverberation – all the covers, everything is like that certain way. I don’t want to do that. I’d rather have some bands I don’t even like on the label. I’m more interested in making stuff happen organically and have it grow, and setting a folk example.

“i love leeds”

Outlaws Yacht Club is cool – I went and gave a talk there. He’s had Andrew Weatherall and Irvine Welsh and all kinds of people. They have these talks called Chinwag – they’re all on YouTube. You just sit on a couch and talk with this guy – he’s a psychologist, he’s really cool. And he could be, like, Ricky Gervais’s cousin, he’s got this really cool mellow, friendly vibe.

“dJ world is bullshit world. GentriFicAtion is A MotherFucker”

I’m gonna give the example of California in the 1950s with beatnik coffee bars everywhere, and people playing music. Thirteen-year-olds could be at all the concerts, and you could have the Rolling Stones play in your school auditorium, or the equivalent. And then music became associated with revolution and rebellion and negativity, so they changed the alcohol laws, so bands could only play in bars. Your opinions are already formed by the time you were 21, because you could only drink after 21. So they stopped the revolution by saying live music can only be in these drinking establishments, so they actually stopped the revolution from happening.

It’s amazing – MTV, all these things,

continuously do this shit. They stop revolutions from happening. They stopped one happening in England by giving everybody all of these fucking drugs, with acid house. Then they said that’s enough, and banned dancing! Crazy. So right now, people are going to need to form associations, which means that somebody better come up with some fucking equipment in Leeds and have that available for mates that are passing through, and that could solve the problem of touring in vans. You could hop on the pensioner bus, the one pound bus.

“thAt’s whAt we need – the AnythinG Goes”

Also from every class, not just art school guys. For some reason, because of bling, everybody’s fronting on Facebook, but who’s gonna tell you that they only have enough money to get pints one night a week? People used to be able to drink multiple nights a week, the whole pub thing. Your granddad could go down every night for a few with his mates, and it’s just not like that for young people.

“PeoPle Are AFrAid to AdMit thAt it’s touGh All over”

They’re just not interested enough in talking to sheep-shaggers in the next shire over, to know that it just sucks everywhere for most people. Starting on a simple level, people think it’s so

fucking expensive to live in London. Well, you need to have like, student housing, get together with your mates and find the best place – if you have to split a room with your girlfriend and your mates, get six people in a house, get a rehearsal space, share the transit. Just… make it work on many different levels. Even entrepreneurs, if it’s your coffee shop or whatever. The important thing is to have some kind of dignity.

“i wAnt to do soundtrAcks”

This is all about having a desire of getting some sort of recognition from a media and a world that doesn’t exist. Now it’s just like, Batman hops into his Batmobile, and Katy Perry’s playing, he chucks out the CD, and then it’s gonna be Kanye West or whatever. Just because of these 360-degree deals that have just been lubricated all together – he’s drinking a Coke, and it’s a BMW Batmobile. I’m really interested in the era where, for a little while, people were just like: “This movie doesn’t have to be about anything other than… we’re really impressed by the way Ingmar Bergman shot The Seventh Seal, it doesn’t even need a story.”

“A Person like JArvis cocker hAs A lot to oFFer society, reGArdless oF his clAss or his AsPirAtions”

I went drinking with him one night a long time ago. My girlfriend at the time

was best friends with Chloe Sevigny, and Jarvis and her were dating for a while. And so I ended up at his house, all of us together. And we went to his local, and some chick went right up to him and said, [adopts Sloaney accent] “Oh, Jarvis, are you slumming it at the pub?” And he just turned to her, it was so great, and just goes, “Actually, this is my local. I’ve had a house here for like, nine years.” And it turned her off, just like that. There’s a switch. It was so cool. I really like that guy.

“i think thAt we should PlAy with ride”

It’s not just nostalgia – I would rather see Lush, because… I’ve been working with Tess, I’m gonna start a Scandinavian acid folk project with this guy Neil from Sereena Manesh, and his girlfriend, and it’ll probably be… five songs in Norwegian, three in Swedish and a couple in English, kind of like a Donovan record, but sincere, somewhere farther out than a Nick Drake record, but with heavy strings, and with a drop dead gorgeous, earthy Norwegian goddess singing.

“i wAnt to see woMen exPress theMselves but not Get PiGeonholed”

So it’s like ultra-feminism, almost. I think that Lush were like that, even though people would think, oh, look there’s girls in the band. They actually had an approach to the audience that had an impact, regardless of gender. More so than Sonic Youth – here’s two women in rock, and they’re doing this thing. But I think Kim [Gordon] is really important too. And I think PJ Harvey is really important. I’d love to have a chat with PJ Harvey anytime. I have a lot of respect for her. Because I thought that ‘50ft Queenie’ shit was bullshit… it was just obnoxious. But when she started jamming with Eric Feldman on ‘To Bring You My Love’ and all that shit, it was just… amazing. I think she’s an amazing individual, and we’re lucky to have people like that in our time.

Not to dwell on it like we’re John Cusack in High Fidelity or something, but just acknowledging little things like that in passing, because urban contemporary culture… a lot of that stuff is just disposable, just going for some chart or some record, and then it’s on to the next thing. Fuck all that – make beautiful records, and people will catch up. So that’s what I really want to do. It’ll all find its place in the end, right? Hopefully.

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Luke Haines has always been an artist that has steered clear of convention and expectation. During the height of Britpop, Haines was more interested in writing songs like ‘Unsolved Child Murder’ with his group the Auteurs and creating side-projects based on the terrorist organisation Baader Meinhof. As the title of his first band suggests, he is an out-and-out, complete artist; his work flow is consistent and he has written many, many albums (24 in total), as well as being an avid painter, writing and releasing two very successful (and excellent) books. He’s even managed to squeeze in a role as the unreliable narrator in a documentary about himself, Art Will Save the World.

Whilst Haines has undertaken many unique and strange projects – a concept album about 1970s British wrestling being just one of them – his latest is perhaps his most unexpected: Outsider Food and Righteous Rock and Roll: A Psychedelic Cookbook.

Several years ago Haines had been putting up the odd recipe on his Outsider Music blog but, as he says, they began to take a slight turn in narrative. “After three Martinis of a Friday night the recipes took on an hallucinogenic turn,” he says. “Meditations on ‘classic’ and obscure rock’n’roll crept in whilst waiting for a 20 minute sauce reduction. I dislike dinner parties, so for each recipe I

conjured up a ‘guest.’ Paul Weller; Marc Bolan; 1970s British Judo champion Brian Jacks, among many others.”

An example recipe title is ‘Drug Onion Soup’, which has a narrative based in 1970s New York and features Johnny Thunders. The book will also be coming with a foreword from Steve Albini, a pal of Haines’ since Albini produced the Auteurs’ third album, ‘After Murder Park’ in 1996, and a keen cook himself, whose barbecue’s are legendary in the world of underground alternative rock.

Haines kindly invited us to his North London flat to cook us a meal and have a chat about his new book. True to the manner in which the book was created, he greets me at the door with a martini firmly in one hand before swiftly making one for myself complete with “a dirty olive”. We have a chat in his kitchen as he prepares the food, a vegetarian take on a spicy ackee dish, replacing what would be salt fish with halloumi. As he allows the onion to brown with the peppers, he tells a tale of having to skin a rabbit for one of his recipes, something that was both very difficult and bloody, leaving him “looking like Peter Sutcliffe”. Haines has a propensity towards spicy food because he’s “ruined his taste buds from fags and booze” over the years and healthy glugs of West Indian hot sauce and spices are thrown into the pan as is, bizarrely, a healthy squirt of budget

tomato ketchup, which he seems immensely proud of acquiring for the low, low price of 69p. It is served with rice on homely cracked and chipped plates and it is sincerely delicious.

We get stuck into the red wine and retire to the dinner table (which also doubles up as a painting work surface) to continue chatting. “I hate dinner parties” he says, “so the recipes are sort of more if you want to impress a lady rather than a dinner party. This is more a one-to-one thing and at the end of each recipe there is a rating of how likely the dish would be to impress a lady – or a dude, whatever takes your fancy. So, it’s that sort of thing, although not necessarily seduction, that would be going too far.”

I ask what it is that he doesn’t like about dinner parties.

“I mean I don’t go to them anymore – my friends know that I don’t like them so they don’t ask me anymore. You have to sit there with people that you’ve known for 20 years and you’ve seen them in the Travelodge with a load of Domestos hanging out their nose at four in the morning and then all of a sudden they turn into Nancy Mitford and it’s kind of like we’re talking about cheese and sitting there really tense and I just think fuck this, I’d rather go to the pub than the formality of food. You’ll notice that there is very little formality tonight – you get your food and that’s it. That’s what I like about

Albini – it’s like, ‘here’s food, fuck off’. You don’t need to over analyse it, you don’t need to turn it into a black art… it’s the same with wine – after two glasses who gives a fuck?” Indecently, the wine keeps flowing on our table, and speaking of booze, many of Haines’ recipes involve cooking with it, something he is rather fond of. “We’re a nation of functioning alcoholics,” he says, “so it’s alright. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t drink too much, apart from the people who can’t drink anymore.”

We start to talk about Lars Von Trier, the Danish film director who has long battled with alcohol and has recently decided to actively start drinking again after a spell of sobriety, because it dried him up so much creatively. “I can see that,” says Haines. “I write better – well, I do better stuff – when I’m less sober. Sadly it does open up a window of fuzziness, which is actually better because it’s very difficult to do creative stuff and be based in reality. You want things quite skewed.”

Moving back to cooking, with booze there’s only one type of alcohol you can’t cook with, reckons Haines. “The only alcoholic drink I would not recommend cooking with is Campari,” he says. “I was convinced you could cook anything with an alcoholic drink but Campari does not work – it has a very nasty, sort of burnt taste. I was experimenting with Campari as a sort of late afternoon drink and seeing where that would take me but I had a fair bit left because I wasn’t that into it and I thought it would be fine once you burnt the alcohol off it, but no. Campari is a big no, no.”

And the best booze for cooking? “You can make a fantastic stew

with Guinness, and vodka is good for spaghetti, that’s really good.”

Haines’ last album was a Mark E. Smith-inspired micro-opera and it’s not long before we’re exchanging anecdotes and favourite MES stories. Haines has a cracking culinary related one as told in Steve Hanley’s (bass player in the Fall) book. “There’s a great bit in the book and it’s towards the end of the ’90s when they are in

Psychedelic cookbook

Currently in the process of crowd-funding a rock’n’roll recipe book, we asked Luke Haines to have Daniel Dylan Wray over for dinner

PHotograPHy: PHiL sHarP / writer: DanieL DyLan wray

Luke Haines

loudandquiet.com 17

real trouble and MES calls a meeting with Steve Hanley and one of the drummers, Simon Walstencroft I think, and he brings along this bloke that he’s met in the pub called Spanish Tony and the idea is that Smith has brought him along saying, ‘Spanish Tony has got a proposition… tapas bar. We’ll have a tapas bar!’ Steve Hanley is just going ‘what?!’ and MES is going, ‘well, you were in the catering business!’ I think [Steve] had gone to college to train as a chef or something and the drummer worked in a chippy, so Smith thinks it can work. ‘You two in the kitchen and I’ll be at the bar greeting people,’ and he’s dead serious about it and then two weeks later Smith says something and Steve says something like, ‘is this to do with the tapas bar?’ and Smith just says, ‘what?’. And Steve says, ‘the tapas bar, we had a meeting about it,’ and MES is just like, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about’. Just the idea of Mark E. Smith ‘greeting’ people in a Fall-run tapas bar…” We both reduce into fits of laughter.

In his own debut book, Bad Vibes: Britpop and My Part in its Downfall, Haines doesn’t hold back on calling bullshit where he saw it going on during that era and the Gallagher’s were frequently included in that. More recently, for the online publication Talkhouse, he wrote a scathing review, nay indictment, of Noel’s latest album (and lyrics) as the High Flying Birds.

“It wasn’t really meant to be a review as such, it was more about – and everyone knows what I think about Noel Gallagher anyway so it’s really not that interesting – his conservative attitude and the rounds of interviews. He’s almost seen as a more relevant interviewee than he is a

recording artist but the interviews are actually quite appalling. I think they’re genuinely quite frightening and harmful considering he’s got such a big audience – I mean he sounds like your granddad now. It’s terrible.”

Haines is a big fan of the Gallagher-lambasting Sleaford Mods. “He [Noel] just doesn’t understand it,” says Haines. “It goes completely over his head, which is bizarre. It’s like your granddad saying, ‘well, they haven’t really got any tunes,’ which is to miss the point. In a way, Jason’s [Williamson, Sleaford Mods’ vocalist] lyrics are a better version of what Liam was doing early on in Oasis. I like Sleaford Mods more for the sort of surreal element rather than it being anything to do with class. We used to go and see them and there would be seven people in the audience and it was brilliant because it was just like this mad man – it was even better in a way when they were playing to an empty room. I love them. I love them more than I’ve loved a group for many years.”

Haines is a busy man, usually working on multiple projects at the same time. “I’m working on a song-based thing,” he tells me. “It’s very short ideas for songs rather than struggling and writing a full song. It’s like having the main bits of a song. It’s going to be about 25 tracks long and last about thirty minutes. The other thing I’m doing is an entirely analogue electronic thing with no vocals, which is a concept album called ‘British Nuclear Bunkers’. It’s an instrumental history of nuclear bunkers.”

They are very singular and esoteric projects, both traits that have come to represent Haines, although not define him, as he can still bash out a pop beauty when he wants to. He explains the idea a little further. “I’m an idiot savant,” he first says, half-joking. “The

nuclear bunker idea just came to me about a month ago. I’d been amassing all these cheap synthesisers – and I use them all the time in these subtle ways – and I thought maybe just do an album just with these, entirely electronic and quite rickety, no vocals. There’s the Camden Borough Control Bunker nearby – it looks like a disused public toilet but it’s actually the entrance to an underground nuclear bunker. It would be the control centre for North London should the time arise. They are huge; they are like huge aerodrome places underground. They were all secret at the time. I don’t want to get too into it, I think it’s the territory of trainspotters in a way, who have little logbooks, but there is certainly something quite attractive about it for an idea for an album.”

Haines’ cookbook is his first experience of crowd funding (at the time of writing his campaign was £4,300 towards a £5000 target), and it’s something that sits well with him. “These are interesting times,” he says. “I mean, it works for an artist like me, but I’m not sure how it does for newer artists who haven’t got the audience. In the old days I laughed at all new bands but now that I’m 20 years older than them I just think it’s a shame they can’t

have a go. I’m all for the 20-year-old chancers with stupid haircuts making music I don’t like; I think good on them. They can’t have that luck that I had, of getting to go on tour and be stupid and be an obnoxious pop-star type person.”

As the wine dries up Haines says: “I think we should retire to the pub.” On our way there he picks up a packet of fags but not before we stop by the aforementioned nuclear bunker which really is only yards from Haines’ home and something you would walk past without blinking an eye normally. Haines likes his local as it serves “psychedelic cider”, the head-spinning, cloudy, strong stuff that has the power to send you over the edge. We settle down outside and talk of music and anecdotes, of Morrissey’s biography (which he reviewed for The Quietus) and his sycophantic praise of Chrissie Hynde in it. Then something twigs and I remember a food-related story from Haines’ second book Post Everything. Wasn’t there an incident with you and her over a sausage or something?

“Yes,” he replies. “She called us Nazi’s for eating them.”

For more bonkers food tales you can pick up Luke’s latest book, which not only will provide a delightfully wonky narrative but also, based on tonight’s grub, a genuinely functional and tasty cookbook, too.

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An audience with Holly Herndon is a bit like the coolest university seminar you could ever hope for. Within the space of an hour I receive a crash course in musical lexicography, Detroit techno, philosophical design, digital neo-feudalism, Internet security, social theory, visual programming and the machinations of corporate espionage. By the end of our time together I’m left with even more questions than answers despite an almost exhilarating overload of information along the way.

The blitzkrieg of perspectives, theories and references might be overwhelming – even exhausting at times – but it comes as no surprise to anybody familiar with Herndon’s CV. Already a Master of Fine Arts graduate from Oakland, California’s Mills College, the Tennessee native is currently a doctoral candidate in composition at Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. It’s the same place where composer John M. Chowning first discovered the FM synthesis algorithm in the ‘60s, later licensing it to Yamaha for use in their famous DX7 digital synthesiser.

Herndon isn’t just here to show off her own intellectual chops though.

She’s taking time out of her career in academia to promote her second record, ‘Platform’, which comes out later this month on 4AD. Even the ostensibly straightforward title holds significance, borrowed from design and philosophy theorist Benedict Singleton and referring to his concept of creating a platform through which we can come together to define our collective future.

We’re here to talk about the music contained therein but there’s a snag: it’s almost completely indescribable. In previous interviews Herndon has talked about a book by Joanna Demers called Listening Through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music, which explores the lack of a suitable musicology lexicon around the sort of music she makes. I tell her that makes my job pretty difficult.

I’m not getting off that easily. “I’m not going to do your job for you!” she laughs, popping some sugar into her tea. We’re sat in a roped-off area of the bar at the modish Ace Hotel in Shoreditch, but Herndon isn’t indulging. It’s still early afternoon and in any case, she’s got plenty of other people like me to see before the day is

done. On press shots she often looks saucer-eyed and cold – almost austere – but away from the high-concept photo shoots and face-to-face under the soft lights of the bar she’s rosy-cheeked and disarmingly pretty.

“Thinking about the lexicon – that’s a good word – I was teaching a class last term at Stanford and we kind of came head-to-head with this issue quite a bit because we were dealing with students from really diverse backgrounds. Like we had students from the electrical engineering department, the physics department or the music department, so we were like using vocabulary from all over the place and trying to find the right words [to describe certain pieces of music]; trying to help the students find their own words.

“I think it’s important when people are writing about music that they draw from their own experience as well and not from this prescribed kind of…” List of genres? “Well you’ve just got to draw from what you know. Maybe you don’t have to draw from other music references, maybe you draw from the other literature you’re reading. So that’s my non-answer for you!”

Okay then, here goes. Herndon’s music represents the raison d’être for magazines like Wire: electronic music that’s entirely emancipated from the past, impossibly futuristic and unapologetically experimental. Each track tends to involve glitchy vocal contortions paired with field recordings and painstakingly programmed synthesiser modulations stretched across invariably unorthodox time signatures.

Herndon’s voice is key. “It often starts with a vocal improvisation within whatever system I’ve set up,” she says of her recording process. “So on [new track] ‘An Exit’ for example, I was like, oh my God I can make my voice sound like a violin, so that’s how it started. You know it’s always kind of some weird vocal thing that I’m doing, then usually a rhythm and then everything else is kind of fitted in.”

It’s a polite oversimplification of more than 15 years’ refinement of her craft. Herndon first crossed paths with electronic music during a German exchange programme as a teenager. It was a formative experience. Immersing herself in Berlin’s minimal techno scene, she would go on to live in the

As far away from small talk as you can get, experimental electronic composer and academic Holly Herndon discusses modern futurism, the NSA and what the Internet can still do for us

PHotograPHy: Sonny Mccartney / writer: jaMeS F. tHoMPSon

Wires in the Blood

loudandquiet.com 19

city for five years, DJing on the club circuit and making her first tentative steps into music production, including an ill-fated stint learning to play contrabass with a Russian tutor.

Realising that she didn’t have to play an instrument to realise her ambitions as a music composer, Herndon instead sought to explore the possibilities of laptop production, eventually moving to California to enrol in a Masters in Electronic Music and Recording Media at Mills College. “I was just kind of noodling around with like sequencers and not at all knowing what I was doing until I went there,” she laughs. “That’s when I learned from [San Franciscan composer] John Bischoff. He started the first network computer ensemble - I think this was in the late ’70s – they were using the KIM 1, which is an early computer that basically looks like a calculator.”

It was at Mills that Herndon first began to experiment with Max/MSP, a powerful visual programming language for music and multimedia that allows direct manipulation and reprogramming of digital synthesisers. Nowadays the software forms a fundamental part of her production arsenal, along with the more conventional likes of Ableton Live. It’s one of the ways through which Herndon is able to push her music beyond traditional genres.

“Electronic music has a wonderful history of futurism but then sometimes it’s like the snake eating its tail or something,” she says. “We get obsessed with futurism from the past, so it becomes like retro-futurism. I mean the idea of futurism is quite prevalent in electronic music but whether or not that is an actual 2015 future or a 1980 ‘future’ is quite an issue.”

For ‘Platform’, Herndon was keen

to continue routing her own sense of futurism to the present. She sought out key collaborators to build upon her innovative compositional approach and reach beyond her own personal perceptions. “Yeah it was me trying not to be so naval-gazey,” she laughs. Dutch design and research studio Metahaven were particularly influential, shaping the videos for ‘Interference’ and ‘Home’ as well as contributing to the aesthetic of the music itself. “One thing I loved about their work is that they’re amazing aesthetes and amazing designs but they’ve made it a really fundamental part of their practice to use their visual, aesthetic language in the service of other ideas and political topics that they’re tackling,” she says. “So that was hugely inspirational and I would like to be able to apply the same approach to my work.”

Herndon also used her lyrics to explore and respond to reflect on modernity, spending a lot of time focusing on the intersectionality of technology and the personal; the private and public spheres and the way in which the pervasion of technology is blurring these, for better and worse. On ‘Home’, she tackles the intrusion of agencies like the NSA into daily life as she sings: “I know that you know me better than I know me.”

I mention the idea of the Panopticon, conceived by philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham as a hypothetical prison of total surveillance and self-policing. Herndon picks up the thread. “I have this sometime collaborator, Hannes Grassegger. He’s this economist in Switzerland and his dad was a victim of corporate espionage in the ‘80s. Like an American guy came over there and spied on him, he thought they were really good friends, the guy went to

his daughter’s wedding, then he found out [about the espionage] later.

“Hannes was telling me that since finding out, the way his family communicate — on the phone, or in an e-mail or in any documented way – has changed because their family was violated in that way. You know, when you start to see your language change… When the language changes, then your brain and the way connections are made begins to change and that structure is changing you, like mentally and physically. The same could be said for the NSA and the way they’re reading our e-mails, you know; the way we change our behaviour, that can have a real physical and mental impact on us. I liked that story a lot.”

For all its weighty societal considerations, though, Herndon likes to think of her music as intrinsically optimistic. Just as the Internet and technology might represent omnipresent intrusion into our lives, so too can those same things bring us together. One of her party tricks at recent gigs has been to pull up an enlarged Facebook invitation for her gig on to a big screen, then trawl through invitees’ photos, updates and relationship statuses in front of a crowd torn between voyeuristic curiosity and mock-horror about who’s on parade next.

Some of Herndon’s positivity stems from her Tennessee family and their Southern spirit. “My family’s like the happiest,” she says with a smile. “They sing and dance in the kitchen and stuff. My partner [fellow composer and collaborator Mat Dryhurst] is British and he’s like, ‘Whoah!’”

Mostly though, Herndon just sees the potential for good in the modern connected world. “I think often, especially in orthodox electronic

music circles, we can often get really depressed with the realities of today and use that as a springboard to have kind of an introspective, escapist aesthetic,” she argues. “I’m more interested in an outward-facing, optimistic aesthetic where we’re trying to imagine what we’d want it to be instead of just being upset with the way that it is.”

One of the tracks on the new record – ‘Lonely at the Top’ – showcases ASMR, or autonomous sensory meridian response. It’s a perceptual phenomenon involving sounds and other stimuli that produce pleasurable tingling sensations in people that experience them. For some people that might be the sound of rain on glass, or rustling paper. Entire communities have sprung up online dedicated to creating and sending these sounds amongst themselves – proof positive, says Herndon, that the Internet can touch our lives in real and physical ways.

“The prevailing idea is that the Internet and our conversations on the Internet are not real and we’re not really connected and it’s dissolving relationships and whatever. I like ASMR as an example of people actually physically connecting over the Internet, sending each other these sounds, comforting and soothing each other. I think it’s a really sweet and optimistic community online.”

Herndon enlisted the help of ASMR expert Claire Tolan to keep things fresh. Tolan whispers comically aggrandising nothings into the listener’s ear in sweet, dulcet tones. “I didn’t want to just do like a regular ASMR song,” says Herndon, “there are so many of them online and I didn’t need to add to that cannon. I thought it would be funny to make a critique of the 1% and how, if you’re born into that privilege, you can convince yourself that you deserve that privilege; it’s not through fate, rather that you, as a person, are so exceptional that you deserve to have all these opportunities that other people don’t have. It’s almost like a coping mechanism.”

Optimistic or otherwise, it’s hard to shake the sense that much of Herndon’s music trades in high-minded intellectualism. A few weeks ago Herndon moved beyond the cosseted technology bubble of San Francisco and Silicon Valley to Los Angeles. Later this year she’s scheduled to play headline shows and festival slots.

I wonder, is there any doubt about managing to translate these complex messages across new horizons? “We really underestimate audiences sometimes,” she insists. “Like, yes, give people enough so that they’re not totally alienated. But also, people are smart and intelligent and everybody’s playlist is way more interesting than we give them credit for. People can handle something a little bit off-kilter; we don’t have to pander to them all the time. Just give people some access points and they’ll go with you on your journey.”

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Busy people fascinate me. As much as try to deny it, fundamentally I’m a pretty lazy guy, so much so that anything that isn’t sitting on the couch watching First Dates seems like a Herculean amount of effort. I find it amazing that there are actual people out there who manage to fit in baking cakes, running half marathons and doing all these other things I keep hearing about.

Admittedly, the bar is set fairly low, but I’m kind of in awe of the members of Sauna Youth. Not only do they live normal, well-rounded lives, they also manage to find time to put out critically-acclaimed records, play almost every show going and balance it all while being in about six other bands. There’s only four of them sat around a coffee table in Jen Calleja’s and Rich Phoenix’s Stoke Newington flat, but they are so productive it almost feels like we’re talking about a whole music scene rather than the output of just one band. “It doesn’t all happen at once – we just do what needs to be done at the time,” laughs a slightly puzzled looking Lindsay Corstorphine when I ask them how they manage to fit in all this relentless activity. “When that’s finished you do the next thing and then the next thing. We’re not doing things constantly; there’s definitely spates when it’s quite hectic, but then equally there’s long periods where we just watch the telly.” “Maybe when you get any free time you end up thinking ‘oh I could be doing something’ and that sort of accumulates over time until you realise that you have a lot on,” adds lead singer/drummer Rich Phoenix before confirming something that I probably knew all along; busy people are just busy because they can’t say no. “I’m learning how to say no,” he agrees,

“more and more I’m finding out that it’s quite an important skill.”

Alongside singer/keyboardist Jen Calleja and bass player Christopher Murphy, Phoenix and Corstorphine have been causing a fuss with Sauna Youth since they first formed back in 2009. Releasing their debut album, ‘Dreamlands’, back in 2012, the post-punk/post-hardcore four-piece has forged a path that has snaked around genres like a drunken rambler, producing a remarkable back catalogue of intelligent yet extremely jagged punk songs that never seem to quite do what you’d expect them to do. Kurt Cobain once asked why Nirvana couldn’t be both Black Sabbath and The Beatles? and Sauna Youth describe their intentions as an attempt to be both The Ramones and Steve Reich. It’s a pretty lofty ambition, but somehow it seems to understate their particular brand of experimental punk rock. Ask Sauna Youth if they ever meant for any of this to happen and all you’ll get is polite bemusement. “I don’t know if we’ve ever had any intentions, there is certainly no feeling among us that we should be doing this or that,” muses Murphy. “Has it taken on a life of its own now? I guess it has; in the same way that these things do when you keep doing it relentlessly. “It doesn’t really feel like being in a band, it’s more like four friends hanging out,” says Phoenix. “We have a good times doing things together and we’ve built this environment where we can do interesting and different things. The longer we’ve kept doing it, the more of these interesting things have started to happen.”

Corstorphine steps in to clear up any impression that Sauna Youth are a band with a particular corner to fight. “This all sounds like we’re struggling to make something happen,” he says,

Shortly after they formed in 2009 SAUNA YOUTH became the most respected underground band in the country, noted by their

peers as a truly progressive post-punk group who were inspired by spoken word and Krautrock as much as the hardcore

greats. They’ve since worked tirelessly to make everything they do – including a new album called ‘Distractions’ –

appear completely effortless

leaning in urgently, “but it’s never actually been like that. Aside from a few times when it’s been a bit stressful, it’s all been quite nice. It’s not like we’re Warzone going ‘don’t forget the struggle, don’t forget the streets.’”

Whether they know it or not, their soon to be released second album, ‘Distractions’, sees Sauna Youth starting to become something that stands alone. Picking up where their debut left off and bookended by two tracks of white-noise, the album is a riotous amalgamation of machete-like guitars and pulsating, hypnotic Krautrock melodies, held together with a strange sense of nail-biting foreboding that kind of reminds me of the second half of Blur’s ‘Parklife’. It’s a record that manages to surprise, entertain and make you think. In fact, it’s a record that shows a band at the height of their creative powers. For Phoenix, the reason that the group has slipped into a rich vein of creativity is a direct result of a better understanding of themselves that has developed over the years. “This album has been the first time we’ve actually written something in a room together,” he says, “and there’s been a lot of stuff we’ve tried out that we’ve either ended up giving up on or having to censor because it wasn’t up to scratch. I guess that process takes longer, but you start to figure out how a Sauna Youth song should sound, and how this combination of people work together.” This method of slowly feeling things out is as much of a mystery to the band themselves as it is to anybody else. “It’s weird,” remarks Calleja on the band’s holistic style of signwriting. “I mean, we had loads of versions of ‘The Bridge’ and we’d keep playing it but

could never get it sounding right until one day it just clicked. It’s not like a conscious thing where we go ‘this is the way it should be’, yet it’s weird how we all end up agreeing on a sound that feels right.”

As well as being sonically adventurous, ‘Distractions’ is also an album that has intelligent and surprisingly challenging lyrical themes running through it. Continuing ‘Dreamlands’ mixture of shouted boy/girl punk interspersed with more experimental sounding spoken word tracks, the album’s 14 songs explore the very concept of desire. And perhaps more importantly, they delve into the area just out of reach of desire, at the very centre of the human psyche. “I guess it’s going back to that thing about constantly doing a lot of things at the same time,” says Phoenix as the line of questioning turns to the album’s title. “It’s like is all the other stuff we do a distraction or is the band actually a distraction from all that stuff? It’s like the desire to do all that stuff, but never quite having enough time to do it.”

Coming across like a loose concept album at times, it’s surprising to find out that the album was never intended to focus on one thought or feeling. “When you do a lot of things you tend to dip in and out of them, so it would be impossible to keep a strong sense of narrative going all the time.” says Phoenix after I ask about whether the album was written with a specific set of ideas in mind. “When you write, you just write; and whatever comes out, comes out. It’s only when you look back over that you start to discover that there’s common threads running through everything.” In a strange way, ‘Distractions’ is quite an aspirational record, dreaming of a world where you can forget to be yourself and offering the idea that you could be

The Art of Keeping Yourself Busy

PHOTOgrAPHY: DAN KeNDAll / wriTer: DOmiNic HAleY

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somebody else. In other ways, however, it’s a record that speaks of the unique, almost existential sense of anxiety and alienation that is a part of life for anyone living in a place like London. That idea that everything you want – a bigger flat, a better-looking partner, a more fulfilled life – is always just around the corner. Tantalisingly close, but forever just out of reach. “London is an amazing place to live and I think it has been a big influence on what I write about,” explains Phoenix as we discuss the city and the unique, neurotic effect it has on people. “It’s an amazing city,” he says. “You are surrounded by all this stuff going on, there’s opportunities to engage with all these creative things

and creative people. We’ve all got friends who are doing incredible and really inspiring things, but there’s always this creeping anxiety that you’re not doing enough. Like, you’re not busy enough or you can’t meet the standard. It does broaden your horizons, but it does create this worry that you can never really measure up.”

Pushed to the extremes, this exploration on the nature of finds form a curious look at the ideas of Transhumanism on some of the album’s tracks. The ultimately futile search for a way to live forever, for something that makes us last, is articulated best on lead single ‘Transmitters’ – “I want my thoughts scratched into plastic / Hear my voice on an

endless loop / I like persistence.” For Phoenix the idea highlights a

junction between absurdity and hope. “My friend showed me a website – he has a link to this company who you pay money to so that they can develop the technology to download you so you can live in some sort of digital afterlife. It all comes with this asterisk that says ‘all this technology doesn’t exist, but if you keep paying us money then we’ll build it.’”

“It’s that sense of the uncanny,” adds Calleja. “Like how people will spend all this money and effort trying to cheat death, but it will never bring any joy. Like on the Internet, where people can build second lives for themselves and be whoever they want

to be, but can never quite escape the real world.” With all this talk of wanting to be someone else, it seems only natura to switch the conversation to the band’s own alter-ego, Monotony. Featuring the same members muddled up, this mirror band is almost the polar opposite of Sauna Youth, replacing drum-tight post punk with snarling, straight-up punk that is much louder, more direct and primal. These contradictions jump out at you when you listen to both bands forthcoming split 7-inch. While Sauna Youth’s single hints at the price of immortality, Monotony’s ‘Luxury Flats’ transplants J. G. Ballard’s 1975 novel High Rise to the soulless arena of post-gentrified London. “Acquisitions, no ambition. Jumping

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off the balcony,” they intone over the swaggering rhythm. It doesn’t get more nihilistic than that. “We were having a terrible band practice,” says Murphy. “Lindsay went to the bathroom and in his absence we started pissing around and Monotony sort of grew from there”

“I just came back from the bathroom, picked up the microphone and started to sing in this moronic way,” says Corstorphine. “That’s not to say it is moronic – it just felt like what was appropriate.”

“Monotony is a celebration of a group’s limitations in a way,” clarifies Murphy. “Jen’s a great drummer and Rich can play bass, but I can’t play guitar for shit. That does control how the band’s going to sound.” Big things have small beginnings, and Monotony has allowed the group to loosen the shackles and allow themselves to head off in new, unexplored directions. “Sauna Youth has sort of developed its own sounds but having that boundary created a problem,” says Calleja. “We became a conscious of it when we’d decided to do an album, and it became frustrating when things weren’t working. It’s weird but when we swapped instruments it just felt like that whole weight was lifted.”

Both bands have a weird parallel existence these days. Since Monotony came together around the middle part of last year, both have played sets from Marc Reilly on BBC 6 Music and both were invited to play Wire’s DRILL festival last summer. However, while Sauna Youth are definitely no slouches when it comes to playing live, Monotony have quickly built a reputation for putting on a particularly

intense show. According to Corstorphine: “We’ve played some of the best Monotony shows when we’ve been really, really drunk and just mucking around.”

If you’re thinking that two bands is enough, Monotony represent the tip of a rather large iceberg. The various members of Sauna Youth lend their talents to so many different and varied projects it actually becomes pretty difficult to keep up. Here’s a brief, and in no way complete rundown of the band’s various activities; Corstorphine plays guitar in Cold Pumas and sings in post-Male Bonding noise makers Primitive Parts; Phoenix plays in Tense Men, puts out his solo work as Twin Lakes/Burnt Brains and runs community project Constant Flux. As for the other two, Murphy is busy printing T-shirts, and Calleja plays drums in art-punk trio Feature, edits Anglo-German arts magazine Verfreundungseffekt and even finds the time to contribute a regular column to The Quietus.

I’m keen to find out what gives them the energy to keep so many projects on the go. Does this constant activity have one overarching plan behind it? Are there common ideas running through all of it? Do Sauna Youth see themselves as outriders of some sort, of a bigger east London scene? “There is this thing that when you identify with a scene then you have to sound or be a certain way,” says Corstorphine pointing out that a philosophy can sometimes be more of a straitjacket than a blue print. “I mean, take DIY for example, I don’t know where it has come from, but there’s this pressure to play punk or adhere to a certain lifestyle. In reality DIY

philosophy exists across the board. Reggae artists have been putting their own music out for years, and house and techno have a long history of releasing their own stuff. We just want to do this stuff because we want to do it, and if we don’t do it ourselves then it won’t happen.”

For Calleja, at least, making music and being in bands comes as much from a personal need than a desire to entertain or make a statement. “All the bands I’ve been in fulfil a different need,” she says. “In the first band I was in, I just wanted to play drums in a band, then I wanted to sing and not play drums so I started Feature, but then I missed playing drums so I started playing drums in Monotony. They all fulfil quite different needs and all speak from different places.” “We’re all into a lot of different stuff as everyone else is in the world,” offers Corstorphine as we try to reason out the band’s collective sense of motivation. “We’re older than a lot of other bands around London, so maybe that has something to with it,” he adds half-jokingly. “We’re definitely not a bunch of young kids starting out trying to sound like Minor Threat or Hank Wood. Y’know, we’re just jamming.”

For natural-born schemers like me, it seems downright odd to start off any venture without having at least an idea of a method. After all, a failure to plan is planning for failure, right? Just putting together this article has meant that I had to make three-pages of notes, draw a diagram and figure out a rough structure of how the whole thing will flow. Now, I know writing an article is

not the same thing as recording an album, but it’s refreshing to come across a group of people who seem dedicated to the idea of just letting things happen. Talking with them for the best part of an hour, I begin to get the impression that Sauna Youth see opportunities and just grab them.

“I think it’s just being with different people and trying out different things,” says Phoenix, summing up the band’s loose philosophy. “Whatever comes out of it depends on how we play our instruments and how you play off each other. That’s what I like about Sauna Youth - it’s not like we want to sound like x crossed with y, it’s just being a room of people and whatever comes out is whatever comes out. It’s only when you look back that you start to explain it, making it look like it was all considered and planned out from the start.”

He has a point. Like a lot of great music, paintings or pieces of art, when you boil it down Sauna Youth stems from the chemistry of four mates hanging out with a desire to make some music rather than a pre-thought out notions to explore particular sounds or ideas. Any meaning, philosophy or ideal evolves from there. After all what’s the point of making the most articulate, politically astute piece of pop ever if no-one will listen and you can’t even dance to it? “I think people get too hung up on the process that they forget to look at the output, which is the only thing that matters at the end of the day,” shrugs Corstorphine, making my point for me. “I’m not constantly thinking ‘how does this fit in’ when we’re doing something; we just carry on. We’ve been doing this for ages – we can’t stop.”

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Ice-lolly in one hand and coffee in the other, Beth Jeans Houghton arches her eyebrow and waits to begin. “I hate it when things are assumed in interviews. There was a woman the other day who asked how I felt when I was forced to change my name and I had to tell her it was my decision.” She laughs, slouching back on a sofa at Mute Records headquarters as if it was her own. “I don’t mind these chats though, as long as you ask good questions.”

I start with a bad one – how is she today? “Great thanks! I am much happier now in general. I can be aggressive in my work but in a positive way – nobody in ordinary life gets to release all that pent up anger in a positive fashion; usually it’s in your relationship through arguments with each other, but I get to do it on stage.” She drops half her lolly and creases up laughing.

It’s taken three years for Beth to finally relax. With her new moniker, Du Blonde, the artist formerly known as Beth Jeans Houghton and the Hooves of Destiny has transformed into, well, herself really. “I think everyone in life should just do what they want,” she tells me. “With the first record I was put inside this box of, ohhh she’s like a young fairy, nice and whimsical’, and I really didn’t feel whimsical at all, so then I started getting into all sorts of other music and it lit a fire!”

Spurred on by the misogyny she encountered releasing her debut album, Du Blonde is both reactive and proactive – a therapeutic cleanse of the soul. Beth cites ridiculous business meetings where boorish men would blame her opinionated attitude on her monthly cycle as inspiration. “That happened in this room! It’s happened twice actually, with two different people!” she exclaims. “Guys think it’s funny but when you have a working relationship with them it completely belittles the point of view you are trying to make. If a woman gets angry or upset in business it’s seen as she’s a diva or she’s emotional; if a guy does it they are congratulated for their passion. A lot of sexism I think is subconscious, which is the most dangerous thing isn’t it.” Beth stops herself. (Du Blonde might be angry but she’s also considered).

“When I was younger I thought that’s just the way it is or maybe they’re right,” she continues. “Now it pisses me off all the time, especially when you’re a grown woman. Clearly this person has no respect for you so you can’t build a business plan or a future on that. It’s not just at business meetings but on stage and sound checks too – you have people explaining stuff to you that you have known for like ten years.”

It was an exhibition that provided Beth her Eureka moment to become

Du Blonde, an afternoon excursion to London’s V&A Museum the catalyst for everything that’s followed and the reason we’re sat here today. She smiles wryly as his name is mentioned. “It was actually a three part epiphany,” she explains. “The first part was the David Bowie exhibition you mention and it was amazing. When I was a kid I really liked people who expressed themselves without judgement or ridicule and also who were prolific and wouldn’t compromise for anyone. I had completely gotten side-tracked and seeing the exhibition made me realise how far away from the point I had gone. I’d just made the record in LA with the Hooves of Destiny that I wasn’t happy with and scrapped, so that was part two… Part three was my breakdown, which was actually before parts one and two.”

Du Blonde ripped it all up and started again then?

“Yeah. Basically it was a year or two of everything going to absolute shit. I’m not bitter about what happened though, this record is me standing up again after everything that’s happened and fallen apart and it’s having that strength.”

We both wonder what David Robert Jones would have made of this shape-shifting new Beth. “Well, the thing about David Bowie was that a lot of people focused on the fact it was him, but it wasn’t, it was someone,

anyone, who was being that creative on all fronts, unashamedly, that was the point, not so much him but what he was doing – I wanted my new album to reflect that.”

‘Welcome Back to Milk’ is the resulting riot of a record. Gone is the baroque chamber pop of Beth Jeans Houghton’s debut, in its place a fierce attitude, big riffs and a highly personal nod to American hardcore. “I saw some footage from a gig that Bad Brains did and I thought what the hell is this? I had heard of hardcore before and listening to it with different ears it was just a noise. Then discovering Bad Brains was hearing noise and aggression but also having really interesting and catchy vocal melodies and guitar lines to it. It’s accessible as well as aggressive and I love it.”

Beth is visibly proud discussing the album and her loyal label Mute. It’s the sound of herself finding her own voice so patience has been required.

“I think anyone else would have dropped me,” she says. “Daniel (Miller, Mute’s founding owner) only got angry once and he’s really accommodating of creative ideas – he tries not to stick his nose into the process and it’s rare for anyone at a label to do that now.”

Where Beth’s first album, ‘Yours

PhotograPhy: gabriel green / writer: ian roebuck

Jeans Genie

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Truly Cellophane Nose’ (an eccentric pop record forever described as ‘wonky’ and largely lost in the hubbub of early-day Florence And The Machine), felt full to the brim, Du Blonde gives you room for manoeuvre. It’s stripped back to bass, guitar, drums and more drums. “They’re great aren’t they,” she enthuses. “It’s Jim Scavlunos [Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds] who produced the record and he is an amazing drummer. We had a month to do it in and he was producing and drumming so he would do a track and then run upstairs to do his part. I had six trials with other producers and they were trying to make me a pop girl and I just wanted to rock… dude!” She leans forward and hand salutes before continuing with a giggle. “He knew all my references, too. It was great for the time constraints – I could say, ‘oh you know, like the guitar part on this track by the Lemon Pipers’, or whatever, and he would be, ‘OK I know it…’ whereas other people would be like, ‘who, whaaa, are they from the nineties?’”

Scavlunos’ no-nonsense producing style has brought the best out of Beth; a rawness captured in her work not seen before, likening tracks to those of Yeah Yeah Yeahs and accessible PJ Harvey. “Other people were trying to make me more feminine, or sweet or soulful,” she says. “Jim was just more anger and more power! He knew what he wanted, I knew what I wanted and

we could butt heads no problem. It wasn’t a case of moulding me into his idea of what a young girl should be, it was just a case of harnessing who I am, which is not that feminine.”

Du Blonde seems like the kind of artist to write a song on the back of a motorbike – a song like ‘Mind Is On My Mind’.

“Yeah, thanks for noticing,” she says. “You read that on the press release didn’t you! It was on a motorbike and the guy had these ridiculous speakers on and he was listening to Aretha Franklin or something so it’s a completely different song and the volume had to be on so loud to get over the engine, completely ostentatious, I know. I had to remember the lyrics all the way from Topanga to Malibu.”

Sam T Herring of Future Islands guests on the track, an artist Beth deeply admires. She’s said before: “I remember the first time I saw him live back in 2012, I said I’m either going to work with him or marry him.”

I presume she’s come to terms with not marrying him then.

“Oh I am more than happy about that,” she says. “I don’t think that would be the best marriage of sorts, but he’s one of my true friends. Musically it’s a good marriage. I played him the song like four times, and he said OK I think I am ready and he went into the booth and all I could see

because of the way the studio was built was his legs going from side to side and his hand going like this [she waves her hand around] at the top above the door, he came out and said how was that… I said that’s fine! He’s like a religious preacher man. That was really inspiring working with him, as this was someone who doesn’t give a shit at all – it is just pure emotion on stage.”

Which is kinda like you, right?“To be honest, you know the knee

thing he does… I’ve been doing that for years. If you have a look at my Jools Holland performance from 2010 or whenever it was… I have got that down. I move around a lot more on stage now. I am not 100% comfortable with it yet but I am getting there.”

Du Blonde also sees Beth ditch the guitar. “But that wasn’t a difficult thing to adjust to on stage. The music lends itself to a performance so it’s a lot easier just to go for it. Whereas before I couldn’t perform the way I am now. I can’t imagine playing those Hooves of Destiny songs ever again, unless maybe I am dying… actually no, if I was dying I’d just want to go on holiday.”

Beth brings us neatly round to the subject of death. “This has been heavier than I imagined,” she tells me, as her head lolls back on the sofa.

For an artist still in her mid-twenties she’s wise beyond her years and album closer ‘Isn’t it Wild’ deals with some big questions, taking in a

moving sample from her dear Grandad. “He was 93 and my Grandma was 87 and I knew that they wouldn’t have long… they were both healthy and their minds were sharp but me and Mum were talking one day and we decided to interview them both for four days and we filmed it. I got all of their stories – they sailed around the world, built a house in New Zealand out of wood from scratch, when they left they sold it back to the Maori’s because nobody else would, just stuff like that as they had such great lives and they weren’t judgmental; they knew who they were and they stuck by their beliefs. That sample is from my mum and gran leaving the room and I wanted to ask him what he thought would happen after he died, as my family never talked about religion, politics or money so I asked him and that was his answer. He had a stroke a month later and lost the ability to talk so that was meant to be. I wrote the song 5 minutes after he died.”

Beth stands up, dusts herself down and says her goodbyes. I ask her what she wants listeners to think when that final track fades out on her new album. “Well, I was thinking about all the other people who go through life pretending to be something they’re not for the benefit of people they don’t necessarily like and then they die and they never got to know what it’s like to be accepted as themselves, so that’s that.”

Inspired by the V&A’s retrospective David Bowie exhibition, Beth Jeans Houghton has killed off her old self to become DU BLONDE – an artist

battling misogyny with songs written on the back of speeding motorbikes

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The music of Aidan Moffatt stinks. That isn’t to say it’s bad, of course, but it is pungent. Ever since forming Arab Strap almost twenty years ago, Moffatt has been one of the most consistently interesting and candid lyricists in contemporary music and this is where the smell comes from. He can transplant a situation into a song with such force and reality it places the listener in that very location and awakens and tingles the senses – his songs are dirty sheets, dank with the smell of cum and stained with week-old takeaways; they are the morning boozy breath from late nights spent drinking; they are the taste of hairspray in the back of your throat from snorting that last pill; the gut-churning pain created by too much heartbreak and too many hangovers.

After doing this for ten years with Arab Strap, Moffatt has undertaken various solo projects, but in 2011 he released a collaborative record with

Scottish multi-instrumentalist Bill Wells. ‘Everything’s Getting Older’ was, as the title suggested, a reflective depiction of life through the eyes of someone leaving their 30s behind them, of exchanging three-day benders for direct debits, school runs and shopping for suits to wear to the never-ending series of weddings, christenings and funerals that now take up the weekends. It was an immensely beautiful record, primarily accompanied by Bill Wells’ sparse piano lines, and it was clear the pair had locked into something quite special. Having just released their follow up, ‘The Most Important Place in the World’, the duo have expanded upon the foundations laid by their debut and made a sonically rich record (one we awarded 9/10 to in our last issue) that sees them hit a glorious stride with Wells’ musical experimentations sitting perfectly alongside Moffatt’s lyrics. The record is

an ode to the city, the feeling of possibility once within the flurry and enormity of a bustling metropolis. So, with that in mind I travelled up to their home city of Glasgow to spend the night with them.

At first we hole down in my hotel room to discuss the new record.

“It wouldn’t be out if we didn’t think it was better than the first one,” says Moffatt. “I’m quietly proud of it and it’s much better than the first one, and certainly my part of it, which is mostly the words, I’m very proud of. Of all my lyrics I’m most pleased with these ones. I can’t listen to Arab Strap lyrics – they’re fucking terrible!” The room fills with laughter, something that will become a recurring theme of the evening.

Wells says: “For me, musically, it’s expanded an awful lot since the first one. The first one it was just like a CDr of music I had around – it wasn’t like I had hand-picked anything, they just

happened to all be together and I was thinking that if one or two things could come from that then fine but pretty much a whole album’s worth came from that.”

Moffatt: “I think what he’s trying to say is that he had some shitty old CD lying around and was just like, ‘Take that and fuck off – you’re not getting the good stuff.’”

The new record is a tough one to pinpoint. There are flutters of minimal jazz, melancholic piano, triumphant brass, choirs, twitching and bubbling electronics. I wonder if they can describe what they think the record actually sounds like themselves.

“Fuck knows!” says Moffatt. “There is both more of a jazz element and less of a jazz element than the last one. I suppose one of the most obvious things is more electronics, which was designed to represent the sounds of the city. Whenever you hear a drum machine or a keyboard it probably

For their second collaborative album, AidAn MoffAtt and jazz multi-instrumentalist Bill Wells worship the city and all its possibilities

PhotogrAPhy & Writer: dAniel dylAn WrAy

City Boys

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signifies that there’s something to do with the city going on. I’ve no idea; I don’t know how to describe it. It’s a faintly jazz… fuck knows. We should watch what we’re saying, folks are really scared of the jazz word – it’s not jazz at all! Fuck that, forget it, it’s got a piano in it but that’s it!

“Bill’s actually ostracised from the jazz community,” says Moffatt, “he’s more indie than I am.” I presume it to be a joke, but it turns out to be somewhat true. “The last time I tried to get on the jazz programme in Scotland they basically told me I was too indie,” confirms Wells, “that I’d be more suited for the gallery show. They had had me there before but wouldn’t again. That’s one of the things I find about the jazz world and that I don’t see eye-to-eye with – that their view point is near sighted and it’s what they immediately see, but what I enjoy about working with artists in the so-called indie scene is that they’re a little bit further back from that and can see a bit more.”

“There is a broader palette in the – want for a better word – indie world,” says Moffatt. “I experienced the same thing last year when I did the folk tour [Moffatt went on a tour of some of Scotland’s further flung parts to perform some traditional Scottish folk songs he had re-written, as part of the commonwealth games celebrations] it can be very insular. Although if you come from an indie background nobody really gives a fuck about what instruments to use or sounds to use, it doesn’t matter. There isn’t a protective thing about it. The spirit of jazz was

about experimentation but now there are fucking rules that you can’t step out of. It’s the same with folk music, it was music for and about folk, the working classes, and now it’s become this middle class thing that people are trying to preserve and they don’t really engage with the people that it was written by. In the indie scene, as it were, there’s no rules; nobody is going to tell you can’t do something, it’s a very inclusive scene.”

Talk soon turns to the city/cities that feature at the heart of this record and what it is about them that still excites Aidan so much. “It’s about the city as a temptress and the potential and possibility of a city. Although most of the action will take place in Glasgow, I get the same feeling from visiting places like Newcastle and London. I don’t know why but I’ve always been attracted to Newcastle. I think because it’s basically just Scotland with a different accent. For the internal artwork I wanted to use a photo I took from Hiroshima. My brother is out there doing a teaching thing and it was my 40th birthday and I took loads of pictures but they were all blurred because I was steaming when I took them… it’s where stuff happens and I just get excited. New York is a perfect example; you just get sucked in, you can walk the streets all night and I have done.

“There’s also an anonymity to it as well – Bill and I are both from Falkirk and it’s a big town but not that big of a town – it was a closed off scene. I knew everyone that was into the same stuff. It didn’t matter if you liked each other

you just had to get on. I think it’s maybe something to do with that, the idea of being anonymous, you can hide yourself in a city a little better.”

As Moffatt attests on album highlight ‘The Unseen Man’: “Fuck going home / Give me chip shop scuffles and screaming sirens and romance among the rats”

“I still get the same feeling from all cities,” he says. “I have a great difficulty going home once I’m here. I mean, I have literally begged friends to stay out with me, so you’ll see me at five past midnight, quite often with Stewart from Chemikal Underground [Aidan’s record label] saying, ‘please, just fucking stay out. I’ll pay for your taxi home. I don’t want to go home.’ Well, it’s not that I don’t want to go home; it’s just that I don’t want the night to end as soon as it does. [Glasgow bar] Nice’n’Sleazy has a lot to blame. That’s been open 22 years now and in the ’90s that is where we all went and it’s still there but it’s not really a place where the bands congregate anymore because there isn’t really a place like that in Glasgow any more because there’s so many pubs and venues but back then it was where bands would meet and play. It’s inevitably where I always end up. I could be at the other end of the city at 1.45am and then jump in a cab to make the last hour but will then end up in a casino or something. I’m just a boy who can’t say no!”

Importantly on ‘The Most Important Place in the World’ the city is presented as a female, as Moffatt explains: “It’s like that idea that you get in film noir and detective novels – the city is always talked about in the sense of it being this wanton women who will chew you up and spit you out. The first song on the album was the first one we demoed and with that line about spreading legs it was clear the city was going to be a woman.”

Four years ago everything was getting older and now things are older still, so I ask if age is something the boy who can’t say no has grown more comfortable with?

“I embrace it,” says Moffatt. “I never really enjoyed being young to be honest. I certainly had a lot of fun but I think you get to a certain age and you just stop giving a fuck – you stop caring about how people perceive you. I’m a lot more confident about the music now and I don’t really care what people think. When you’re young and you’re making records you’re terrified people aren’t going to like you and I suppose these days you have things like that online, kids worrying how their online persona is perceived but you then reach a stage in your life

when you realise these things are not important at all. You just do what you do. So yeah, as far as age goes, I’m very happy, I’m very comfortable… I think.” He chuckles. Similarly, Bill feels he’s sitting in a sweet spot.

“I’m glad to have done a few things in music that I can say I’ve done and there was a big stretch in my life being involved in the jazz scene where I didn’t really feel like I was going anywhere. It’s nice to have people know what you’re doing. I think unless you’re naturally brilliant, which I’m not, you have to work away at it.”

So you’re in a period of being able to reap the rewards from years of hard work now?

“I guess so, yeah.”“Just at the time when no-one is

fucking buying any records!” says Moffatt.

Bill heads home and Aidan takes me to the aforementioned Nice’n’Sleazy where we stay, as you would expect, until closing time. Moffatt recalls experiences and memories, such as seeing Mogwai play some of their earliest shows in the basement and he is something of a celebrity in the place. We are ushered to the front of the queue where our entrance fee is not accepted. We are bought pints and shots from groups of admiring strangers. Once the club kicks us out we retire to my hotel where we drink my mini-bar dry and watch and analyse the final scene from The Sopranos on YouTube until 5am, until it really is time for Aidan to go home. I awake with fingers still sticky from Sambuca and a raging, eye-throbbing hangover that threatened to exit my breakfast all over the hotel bar floor. As I sit myself down on the train, dreading the five-hour return leg, the woman next to me pulls a soured and disapproving face. I stink. Booze is seeping out of my pores and cloaking my every breath. But Aidan Moffatt stinks too.

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ImmaculatePhotograPhy: ruth radelet / writer: reef younis

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Isolation�

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“Hey Reef, this is Johnny. What is your bedtime tonight? I’m on a graphic design spree out at the airport… I’m in a really fluid rhythm and I don’t want to break it.”

Johnny Jewel is in the zone. He’s been up since 6am, back in Portland on one of his semi-regular trips to design, paint, and pick up a stack of vinyl, CDs and t-shirts from storage. With a busy day done, and a hectic one set before flying back to LA the following day, we bounce a few texts to lock down a time and place to meet. It’s around 12.30am when he walks into the bar next to Portland’s Mississippi Studios and we end up talking into the early hours of the morning about his thirteen years living in the city, his move to LA, running a record label (in the true sense of the term) and working with Hollywood, amongst other scattered topics. Refreshingly, he insists on chatting for at least an hour, determined to have a conversation that isn’t squeezed into a quick-fire 20-minutes or sandwiched between nervous prompts from a PR. The result is a dialogue that digs into the drive and understated intensity of a man happiest in his own bubble, fiercely determined to work to his own schedule, and deeply reflective about everything he creates.

The brain behind synth pop and Italo disco groups Chromatics, Glass Candy, Mirage, Symmetry and Desire, label boss of the fiercely independent Italians Do It Better, and an increasingly accomplished composer with work scoring music for Bronson, Drive and Lost River, Jewel is a busy man. Relaxed and black-clad, he effortlessly blends into Portland’s late-night boho crowd and you feel he has all the time in the world as opposed to someone who’s been working for the last 22 hours. Juggling the responsibilities of touring, label releases and album output for multiple acts, he’s practically a one-man workshop. A musician, a designer, a

producer, an engineer, a mixer, and a photographer, Jewel has always maintained he is happiest out of the spotlight, but when you’re involved in every level of the process the way he is, you quickly run out of shadows.

Born in Houston, Texas, and currently living in LA, there’s been a healthy transience to Jewel’s life since he left Portland for Montreal in 2009. And after living in the Rose City for 13 years, it seems Portland still has a professional, emotional pull.

“It feels more like home than Texas, than Montreal, than Los Angeles,” he says. “I’ve been in LA for two years but I don’t interact with the city at all. I still haven’t been to a show there; I’ve gone to the grocery store about seven or eight times… I really am super isolated but I’m lucky to be able to make it my own experience. I have friends and people I work with who are really into the city, and I hear it’s great, but I haven’t got round to that yet.

“I had such a good time living in Portland,” he adds, “and I wouldn’t be the person I am if I hadn’t lived here. Ruth [Radelet, Chromatics’ singer and the photographer of our shoot] still lives here, Ida [No, Glass Candy’s vocalist, whom Jewel moved in with when he moved to town] grew up here, and then I met Adam [Miller, founding member of Chromatics] in here, even though he was living in Seattle at the time. I’d never have met those people if I hadn’t lived here. They’re my family now.”

Isolation and self-containment become pretty consistent themes as we talk. At face value, it’s an outlook that sounds reclusive and withdrawn, but as Jewel continues to dig into the reasoning, it’s apparent that it’s a pivotal part of how he works. “I’m always alone except for the people I’m working with, so it doesn’t really matter where I’m at. I don’t get that claustrophobic feeling that other

people get in small towns,” he says. “I lived in Austin and it’s kind of

the same thing here where you feel you can’t really go out without seeing anybody. I never go anywhere so I never see anybody anyway, you know?” He chuckles. “I just need somewhere where I can work and there’s something about the air that helps me feel awake and motivated. I kind of operate on a 27-hour day, so by the end of the week I’m almost inverted. I just go until I’m tired or I reach the point where I quit being productive and it becomes compulsive.”

Jewel’s move to a metropolis as sprawling as LA seems counter-intuitive to that intent, but the change in scenery proved to be the catalyst he, his girlfriend and his primary group Chromatics needed. Turns out switching Montreal’s snow with LA’s sunshine was less about the lifestyle and more about necessity. His mail was being sent to LA, his office is there, he was constantly in town to work on a film or a commercial or a television show. “I got sick of having to go back and forth,” he says, “and my girlfriend, who’s a Quebecer [Megan Louise, the singer in Jewel’s third group, Desire], got sick of the snow and she was like, ‘why don’t we just move to LA?’ It’s the first time in five years everyone in the band is on the same coast. It’s been great.”

Today, Chromatics are Jewel’s vision – so much so that many will presume the imminent ‘Dear Tommy’ LP to be the project’s third album, following 2007’s breakthrough ‘Night Drive’ and 2012’s expansive ‘Kill For Love’. The two albums that proceeded those records (‘Chrome Rats Vs Basement Rutz’ [2003] and ‘Plaster Hounds’ [2004]) have pretty much been wiped from history, predating Jewel’s involvement as producer, writer, spokesman and label boss, and resembling a completely alien group

– one with different members apart from Adam Miller, and a bog-standard indie-rock direction over what we’ve become familiar with: the dirty, romantic sound of vintage synthesisers, crystalline drum machines and brittle, dystopian guitars to drift around city streets to after nightfall.

It’s a similar story for Glass Candy – a group Jewel formed with singer Ida No, who were happy to express themselves as a glam rock/new wave band on their 2003 debut, before electronics took over for their first album on Italians Do It Better in 2007. ‘B/E/A/T/B/O/X/’ will finally get its follow up this year, entitled ‘Bodywork’. That’s an eight-year interim – a stark indicator that time and patience are non-negotiable factors for Jewel. Unwavering in his commitment to never rushing releases out, they’ve become two essential hallmarks that have made his work (in whatever form) enduring, and something he doggedly protects.

“A lot of the stuff takes me years to do,” he tells me. “There’s things I’m still working on that I started in Portland, and I don’t mean songs, I mean actual tapes, actual recordings. Some went to Montreal and got worked on, some came to LA, and they’re getting worked on. The work is open-ended – it feels like it’s never finished, and because of that, it’s not tied to a place. I haven’t been on stage for 16 months, which is really exciting,” he smiles.

“Because I run everything, when I travel it all freezes… everything just gets backed up and that’s why things take so long. I like touring but I don’t have to do it the way some bands do, if they have to make money or are locked into a contract. For me, I tour when I want to tour, and when it makes sense.”

It’s a freedom created by design. Unbound by external label pressures or fixed release dates, there’s an

Johnny Jewel has taken the concept of DIY to an unchartered and sophisticated territory, with a cinematic style of electronic pop that’s more associated with savvy teams of marketing specialists than totalitarian control. With a new ChRoMATICS album imminent, he explains to Reef Younis how he operates on a 27-hour day to doggedly protect his artist freedom and maintain the most successful cottage industry in pop music

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element of control but perhaps more crucially for Jewel, it’s about ensuring that artistic creativity isn’t compromised by arbitrary timelines or soulless business drivers. It’s a commitment to being uncommitted where pressure isn’t the enemy; it’s simply finding and applying the right type.

“I’ve never allowed myself to be put in that position and I’ve never allowed anybody to have power over my output in any way,” he says. “It seems so absurd to me that external, non-creative entities can enter the creative arena and set a timer; it does not make sense to me at all. If you’re undisciplined, I guess you need external pressure, but I don’t think it’s good for creativity. It’s not about vibing and chilling out, it’s about appropriate pressure, competition, ambition… those things that can come from within inside yourself. They’re appropriate pressures that can stimulate you to complete something in a healthy way, not having the schoolmaster yell at you about a pie chart or a graph around the fourth quarter. But it’s all good because they have a pocket of cocaine and they’re cool guys… it’s not my thing. It makes sense to me that the industry that that’s a part of is dying and it deserves to die.”

still very structure-less,” Jewel later insists. “Like, where does an idea come from? I have no fucking clue. How do you write a song? I have no idea. How do you know when something’s done? – I feel like I’m getting better at ‘pulling the trigger’, as I call it. There are points where you know you have a song; you just have to know when to finish it.

“I’ll let something marinate,” he tells me, “and I’ll wait for months until an element occurs to me to help harmonise or balance the song. I decide to wait but I’m not deciding there’s something missing, you know? That’s why the lack of a schedule is so important, because if you have someone telling me that this needs to be done by a certain time, or I’m telling someone else it needs to be done by this time, I’m not allowing for them to know when it’s done.”

It helps explain the introspection and contemplation Jewel experiences with every release. Where some feel relief, he feels the finality; the acceptance that it’s as close to finished as it will ever be, however frustrating. He tells me:

“Any time I release a song or an album, I’m depressed afterwards for while. I’m functional – I’m not a wreck – but I feel a loss because I never want to finish it or close it in the way that’s released because they’re my babies.

“When we released the first single for ‘Dear Tommy’ [‘Just Like You’] everyone was over at my house and everyone was really excited but I just wanted to be alone and I ended up pissing some people off because they wanted me to be joyous and I wasn’t feeling that way. I was really proud of the song but this shit is so personal, and it’s really intense because you put it out there.”

He continues: “I started recording in 88/89, and I didn’t release anything until 94/95 because I was uncomfortable with people knowing I was doing something. It’s the reason I didn’t put anything out there for so long and it’s why when I went on stage I’d wear make up, because I wanted a shield or a barrier. For a long time I didn’t do interviews because I didn’t want to be out in front, but I knew it was inevitable once I started talking. I’m proud but joy isn’t the word when I release music – it’s very contemplative and personal. It’s not like I have regrets but only I know what I want it to be,

and of course you never achieve that because it’s an idea, and you can never really make ideas real.”

It’s an awareness and deeper-thinking that informs every step of the music making process – from the nuances of a single instrumental element to the more philosophical question of trying to deconstruct the meaning of what’s being created. They’re questions and thoughts that clearly sit with Jewel from the early concept, right through to completion. “A more concrete example is mixing an album or mixing a song,” he says. “I could listen to a single drum all day long if it’s a good sounding drum. So I want you to hear that drum, and every nuance of the vocal, of the guitar, of the synthesizer, of the hi-hat. I’m trying to push all of this forward but not everything can be on top, so for me part of finalising something is marrying the relationship of those elements permanently. In my ideal world, everything would be the loudest thing. But it’s funny because I slave over the mix and I know that 99% of the stuff is going to be heard on a phone,” he laughs. “It’s a Wagner-style tragedy that I find amusing. I schedule everything like vinyl, and I know it’s getting streamed like ‘the hits’ but I got

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to make the record I want to listen to, on real speakers, from a real turntable. I’m the one that has to live with that.”

Listen to Chromatics’ gilded pop atmospherics and it’s hard to imagine Jewel not hunched over a mixing desk, 22 hours into a 36-hour session, trying to perfect every element, every harmony, every fleeting dynamic. The balance and beauty of Chromatics’ last record, ‘Kill For Love’, felt like an album that was obsessed over, and even though Jewel might be aiming for perfection, he doesn’t consider that to be a defining factor.

He says that even though he spends so much time with a record that he’s labelled a perfectionist, really he isn’t. “I like the blood and guts,” he says, “I like it messy, I like it raw, so anyone who says I’m a perfectionist hasn’t heard my record because there’s so many mistakes, so many frayed edges, and things that are out of pitch, or rhythms that are off, and that’s imperfect in its own way.

“I love how raw something I recorded 10 years ago sounds compared to something I’m working on now, on the same equipment. We live in a time where musicians are so ashamed of their past and there’s this intense desire to start a new project,

change the name, shroud it in mystery, and hope that no-one checks out what you used to do because it doesn’t define you as a person anymore.

“It’s the only art form I know where change is a bad thing. It’s crazy because in film it’s celebrated, and each film is different. In music, people have this sort of hang up where if I’m going to make a certain type of music I have to dress a certain way and only listen to this type of record. For me, music is a journey and the music I make doesn’t reflect what I listen to, and the way I look doesn’t make sense for the music I make. None of it defines anything else and there’s no identity wrapped up in it. I’m a person who happens to like certain things for certain reasons, but I don’t have to re-define who I am as a human if I want to make an artistic expression. ‘I’m a heavy metal guy, I can’t do this, I’m a house guy, I have to live like this, I’m a punk guy, I can’t do this.’”

Change, though, is a factor. There’s defiance not just in the way Jewel works but in the creative decisions he makes. Taking years to release a new album is a bold stance but having the conviction to return with a different sound only happens with genuine confidence and a willingness to engage

with fans. These subtle evolutions gave ‘Night Drive’ its dark disco nuance with the soft-funk of ‘I Want Your Love’ and the marathon, minimal slink of ‘Tick of the Clock’, but also enabled follow up ‘Kill For Love’ to bloom with grander, ghosting dynamics. Characterised by the airy ‘Running From the Sun’ and the languid ‘My, My, Hey, Hey’ twist of ‘Into The Black’, it felt like a big, blended step towards the winding scores Jewel has evolved into over the last few years. And, if recent tracks like ‘In Films’ and ‘I Can Never Be Myself When You’re Around’ – teased from the forthcoming ‘Dear Tommy’ – are any indication, this time Chromatics are set to amplify the aloof with more anthemic intent.

“I never want to make the same record twice,” Johnny states. “Even though there’s a sound, the albums are eclectic and I can take a really hard stance as a producer to be defiant. It was like when I put ‘The Tick of the Clock’ on ‘Night Drive’, everyone thought I was insane. There’s no singing, there’s one note, it’s sixteen minutes long… it’s part of the album. If people are going to skip over it, fine, I don’t care. It ended up being understood years later but only after it was sugar-coated for people.”

self-sufficiency of Jewel’s disco empire has extended exponentially. His projects needed a label to release their materials without the need for buying into the conventional music industry, so he built Italians Do It Better; we needed to arrange a photo shoot for this feature, so Chromatics’ own Ruth Radelet took care of it. Jewel doesn’t employ a PR team to execute the usual round of press interviews and promo trails, leaks and well-placed video premieres, which is essentially why we’ve been trying to interview him for three years. It’s about ultimate control, but also maintaining a personability, especially where Jewel’s predictably hands-on approach to social media is concerned. He doesn’t care for Twitter – in any of his project guises – but Jewel personally posts across the Facebook pages of Chromatics, Glass Candy and his lesser known Anglo-French trio Desire, while Soundcloud has become his invaluable distribution tool – he gave ‘Kill For Love’ away through the streaming site, and has so far followed suit with the first three

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tracks from ‘Dear Tommy’. He tells me: “A lot of bands don’t take enough time to interact with their fans in a way that the they can understand the evolution that’s happening between records. There’re a lot of things, conceptually, that you can share through social media that help prepare for directions that shift or change. It takes a lot of work but it’s an artistic process in tandem with the music that’s really fun for me. It’s a chance to experiment and share ideas that are visual or referential but that are part of the concept of the band or where the record’s going.”

This idea takes us back to the importance of the creative freedom Jewel has built, not just for himself, but also for everyone associated with Italians Do It Better. With Glass Candy three albums and 15 years in, and Chromatics five albums and over a decade in, Jewel has diligently tended the garden beyond any fleeting hype – something he feels others neglect all too easily. And with so long between albums, Jewel’s work neatly avoids the trap of music fashions and fads – his records arrive when they’re ready, sometimes accompanied by kindred releases, but often isolated and always unapologetic.

“Another thing that bands don’t do is protect their creative process,” he states. “That first album or whatever that has a breakthrough… there were a lot of people that hated that album, you know, you just never heard about it because the overall reaction was so positive. Nobody agrees universally that a first album is good, it’s just the band focuses on that and the people that don’t like it just aren’t writing about it yet. By the time the second album comes, people want to start attacking. You have to protect your creative process so that you can make a free record, an instinctual record like that first one. It’s very rare that people protect that space, either they think they’re great and they can do no wrong, which is often the case, or the personalities in the band are stretched apart and the chemistry isn’t there in the same way. All these things pollute the water and if you don’t take conscious steps to protect the band from that kind of shit, you’re going to make an inferior record second time round and it just diminishes from there.”

Jewel also argues that lack of awareness can be just as damaging, particularly if egos are left unchecked.

“I also think that bands don’t need to read press,” he says, “it’s ridiculous. Are you an artist or not? If you’re not an artist then why are you posing in an artistic industry? Go sell vacuum cleaners if you want to make money. I’m a curious person but I don’t have the drive to make a film and I’m not going to make a film just because I could or because I think it’s cool.

“There’s a naivety with a lot of people’s early work, they’re unaware of how it happened in the first place and then they’re really quick to take

credit for it. Ego is an enemy and that’s what kills great chemistry.”

Manipulating publicity is also a major gripe for Jewel, and he has no sympathy for those that try and play the game but inevitably get steamrolled by the hype machine.

“There’s a reason you hear about bands and then you don’t or a certain amount of time passes and then it becomes a comeback,” he argues. “It’s because they use publicity as a weapon and it’s their own fucking fault!

“You’re an idiot if you think that when there’s a push there’s not going to be a pull. I don’t feel sorry for bands that cram stuff down everyone’s throats, but it’s lopsided how hard they push versus where they would have gotten by word of mouth. The thing is people are in a band and they go, ‘I want a manager, I want a publicist’. Bands have lawyers before they play their first show, which is crazy, and if you’re going to play that game, you need to be smart enough to know that it’s going to kill you.”

It’s no surprise that these shortcuts elicit such a strong reaction, because they’re the antithesis to everything Jewel has patiently built over almost two decades. Put into the context of his story, even at close to 2am, his frustration and depth of feeling is palpable to what he sees as a cold cynicism fuelling dead-eyed capitalism at the expense of creativity. It brings us onto his role within Chromatics, Symmetry, Glass Candy and Desire, and whether each band is an opportunity

to satisfy his curiosity and explore something different. It certainly seemed to be the case with Symmetry, Jewel’s instrumental duo that eventually became the outlet for his alternative soundtrack to Nicolas Winding Refn’s movie Drive. Jewel had been commissioned to score the film but was later overlooked for Cliff Martinez (who included Chromatics’ ‘Tick The Clock’ and Desire’s ‘Under Your Spell’ in his soundtrack), later resulting in the release of Symmetry’s two-and-a-half-hours-long LP ‘Themes For An Imaginary Film’ in 2011. (“I know it’s not a nice thing to say, but my score was superior,” Jewel told The Guardian in 2012. “It was the director’s choice, Ryan’s [Gosling] choice… but in movie production, there’s a money side and a creative side, and they don’t always meet in the middle.”).

“It’s kind of about working with different people,” says Jewel, of his multiple projects. “For example, Natty [Walker], he’s with me in Desire, he’s with me in Chromatics, he’s with me in Symmetry and now he’s working on the new Glass Candy record with me as well. He’s incredible, a total genius. He’s really coming from a hip-hop background so when we work we really get into beats where there’s no room for vocals… or the kind of vocals we would normally write. With Megan [Louise, of Desire], she has an incredible voice and a wider range than Ruth and Ida, and had a sound that was good for a type of pop that didn’t work with anyone else.”

It’s a similar story with Ruth Radelet and how her rootsy musical background became the perfect foil for Chromatics’ evolving noir pop, or how Ida No became the ideal contradiction that made Glass Candy work. It’s a familiar story of opposites attract. Says Jewel: “One of the great things about Chromatics is that Ruth would have been the antithesis of what Chromatics used to be. It’s the difference of her coming from a blues and folk background juxtaposed with electronics and distance. It’s not about ‘you’d be perfect for this’, because that’s what a lot of bands tend to do. For me, it’s about the counter-balance.

“Ida and I are so different in every possible way but we make a complete idea. There’s a strength in opposites and a lot of bands are kind of bland because they’re stylised and all going in the same direction. It’s opposites and polarity that makes bands. You need explosiveness, tension, friction. If you can find a way to have unity within that, it’s incredible. It’s difficult but if you don’t have that, the art isn’t as complete and you’re only telling part of the story.”

From depressed contemplation to defiant confidence; happy isolation to a ‘family’ of friends, there’s a paradox to Johnny Jewel that sits just as effortlessly as his music. The make-up, designed to help mask early insecurities became a beacon in the same way Chromatics’ effortlessly enigmatic electronic pop helps shadow the intensity of its chief creative force.

“There’s nothing anyone can tell me about my own work that I haven’t thought about for a 1000 hours already,” he tells me, “and that includes praise, criticism… everything. I have a severe lack of interest in what other people think about what I do but I am happy when people connect with it. I want more people to hear it, and I want it to spread because music is so important to me and it’s exciting to think that your music is reaching people, becoming important to them, and doing the same thing for them that bands did for you.”

You wonder if Jewel will ever allow himself to enjoy the spotlight instead of simply accepting its inevitable glare, or if the post-release contemplation will become any less intense. At this stage it seems unlikely but there is at least time – he always makes sure of that.

“As an artist you’re not realistic, you’re crazy… and it’s not because I kinda look gothic,” he laughs. “It’s the desire to transcend the conflict between concept and reality and it’s the idea that it’s beautiful and it’s unattainable. It’s what we chase and sometimes you just want to hold onto it, and letting it go is a reminder that you never really held it in the first place. I have to have my moment with each thing in that way. So much music I work so hard on I will never release and no one will ever hear it. There’s something beautiful about that.”

“Go sell vacuum cleaners if you want to make money”

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In 2011, somewhere amidst the blitzkrieg of ‘Tarot Sport’ and the rumbling intensity of ‘Slow Focus’, Benjamin John Power – one half of noisegaze duo Fuck Buttons – began putting out his own music. A solo-project given the equally brilliant pseudonym of Blanck Mass was born, which saw Power move away from the skull-splitting immensity of his best collaborative work.

Power’s self-titled debut was a soporific journey into the gloaming, fuelled by dense loops and heavy-set ambiance. It retained the disquiet of his collective work while fleshing out Fuck Buttons’ dark potency with warmer, more impressionistic tones that skirted the edge of brilliance. Follow-up EP ‘White Math/Polymorph’ arrived a year later in 2012, keeping up a similar rhythm, adding greater structure to Power’s nebulous atmospherics. But despite

both being very capable records, neither truly elevated Power’s career beyond the tag of “a side-project from that guy out of Fuck Buttons”. ‘Dumb Flesh’ is here to change that, bringing us something far closer to his work with Andrew Hung – a fact that’ll be resoundingly clear if you’ve heard lead single ‘Dead Format’.

An indication of Power’s new direction, ‘Dead Format’’s foundations are built on crushed electronics and relentless future-tribal percussion; vocal abnormalities intermingling with serpentine drones, while undulating synths rise to a fearsome crescendo. And it’s not alone – closer ‘Detritus’ takes a similar lead, the eight-minute monolith opening with two solid minutes of furious static that crashes with unrelenting force, before the melody slowly rises in a triumphant moment similar in tone to

‘Tarot Sport’’s now infamous – and slightly overused – ‘Olympians’.

Yet this isn’t simply a one-handed Fuck Buttons LP. Rather it’s a unification of the two opposing strands of Power’s career. The result is something unique to Blanck Mass, which takes maximalist sonic savagery and intertwines it with layers of convulsive ambiance.

‘Atrophies’ swirls with stop-start beats and a recursive melodic shimmer, before breaking down into otherworldly funk. ‘Lung’ then simmers with distant wistful ambiance and a ceaseless, mesmeric thump, as Power throws in chopped up organics to momentarily unnerve you before dismissing them in drops of metallic sound. If there is a running theme across the album, it’s one akin to Cronenberg-esque body horror – or maybe just the end of Superman 3 – as organic and inorganic materials

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intertwine in orgiastic union, like on ‘Cruel Sport’, where Power rinses a vocal sample into an indistinguishable morass of hedonistic dance. Opener ‘Loam’, meanwhile, is entirely built around a backmasked lyric slowed down to torporific proportions; a message you’ll never understand dropping into a digitised haze like molten lead into water.

As part of the Fuck Buttons, Power’s is one half of the most influential and sonically inventive groups of the last decade; their drones, breaks and beats reshaping a genre and challenging everything we’ve come to expect from modern electronica. But now, as Blanck Mass, he’s beginning to reach those same heights alone. ‘Dumb Flesh’ is the borderline masterpiece that finally brings Power’s genuine definition as a solo artist.

09/10

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Patience is a virtue for Jamie xx. After ghosting to prominence with The xx back in 2009, he’s defied the Hypem rise in favour of a far more studied route. Shuffling out of the band’s shadow, his sterling production work and regularly stellar DJ sets have always been performed with the steady self-assurance that, unsurprisingly, guides ‘In Colour’.

Opener, ‘Oh My Gosh’ is the album banger, with subterranean beats and ragged percussion biting with the urban snap of London’s

When I moved to a new city for university eight years ago I’d find myself at the student union’s indie disco every Wednesday night. At the risk of sounding like an old man yelling at a cloud (or a rookie VICE scribe), nothing much about those sorts of nights seems to have changed since. Yer Cribs ‘n’ Libs remain intact, the old guard are still represented by the same rotation of Smiths, Pulp and Blur hits, and even the token electro section behaves like Hot Chip were over after ‘Over and Over’.

For some reason unbeknownst to me, much of ‘Ratchet’ – the debut album from 20-year old Las Vegas wunderkind Shamir Bailey – takes

me back to those weekly thirty minutes of bleepy mayhem. Its perky lead singles, ‘On the Regular’ and ‘Call It Off’, both perfect synthetic confectionaries with accompanying videos of googly eyes and Jim Henson puppets, would have slotted in perfectly with ‘Golden Skans’ or ‘Alala’ with no one batting an eyelid. But this gut reaction does Shamir a total disservice, and there’s far more to ‘Ratchet’ than soundtracking a blitzed evening.

The irrepressible ‘Make a Scene’ has an anthem’s trappings – burbling synths, a joyous hook and a devil-may-care attitude – but its lyrics heap scorn upon the culture those songs were jerrybuilt for. “Live it up,”

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he raps, “it’s Saturday night, so let’s puke our guts up and start some fights.” You get the sense Shamir doesn’t mind being understood, but you wonder if he may regret it a little later on. Likewise, the hyper-detailed arrangements of ‘Vegas’ immediately recall ‘Sign ‘O’ the Times’, but its cynicism towards teenage suburban living is pure punk rock.

Sadly, joke or not, the bangers start to wear a little thin as the album goes on. Fortunately, Shamir does downtempo even better – the sultry ‘Beast’ is a wonderful coming-of-age romance, but ‘Darker’ is the real highlight. Starting with some moody soundtrack strings and tense drumrolls, it strips itself back almost

concrete beats. ‘Sleep Sound’ beautifully swims into focus – even without the visual accompaniment of the brilliant Sofia Mattioli video – and ‘Loud Places’ is the sun-up saviour, a slow-bloomer washed with fellow xx Romy’s husky vocal and mild euphoria to take the edge off a long night.

It’s everything we’ve come to expect from Jamie Smith – unhurried, uncluttered, and weighted with a black-clad melancholy, it’s the long-play hallmark of the club-based

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boom picked up on the dance circuit but tempered by a producer who feels most comfortable in inky bedroom gloom.

Familiar dream pop elements drift with a soft 8-bit lilt on ‘See Saw’ before ‘Hold Tight’ drops into ‘Music for a Jilted Generation’ territory – rave re-imagined for aloof young millennials. Assured, polished, and precise, if we’ve learned anything over the last few years it’s that a little patience has only ever heightened Jamie xx’s brilliant understatement.

immediately, becoming another falsetto-led doff of the cap to The Purple One – this time, the dusky optimism of ‘The Cross’.

‘Darker’ shows that, when Shamir strips it all back, he’s absolutely on to something great. While ‘Ratchet’ isn’t the immaculate conception of a fully formed artist, it does demonstrate that its creator knows his shit. He’s as vocal about his love for Vivian Girls and The Slits as he is about Prince or Larry Levan, and it’s fascinating to hear. As it is, Bailey is laying all his cards on the table with his debut; with such a precocious debut, you can only hope he picks a path for the follow-up. Lord knows time is on his side.

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Three years on from their debut album, Metz have returned with what singer and guitarist Alex Edkins describes as their “relationship” album, focusing not on love and romance but the trio’s interactions with everything from the media and consumerism to anxiety and death. Tackling such lofty lyrical fodder is certainly admirable, though for a majority of their fans, the Torontonians’ most important relationship of all is the one they share with noise. On that score, Metz certainly don’t disappoint here. Bigger, faster, louder, stronger – in many ways ‘II’ is everything the band’s second record ought to be. Songs still invariably seem to lumber – mangled and distorted – from the embers of a blown-out amplifier, before screeching into life with a Bleach-era Nirvana riff and Edkins’s lacerated-with-barbed-wire vocals. This time around though, there’s a balls-to-the-wall intensity of it all that threatens to drown the melody of potential anthems like ‘Wait in Line’ and ‘Spit it Out’, before the end of the track arrives and you’re still screaming the chorus.

Dutch multi-instrumentalist Jacco Gardner belongs to a time and place that never existed. His second record faithfully recreates Paisley Underground-style psychedelia sprinkled with a quintessentially Middle England sound, as if Opal and Syd Barrett had somehow collaborated at Eel Pie studios. To add to the charm Gardner plays much of this on instruments seemingly gleaned from vintage music shops and flea markets, with harpsichords, mellotrons and wurlitzers adding an air of timelessness to his pristine psych-balladry. ‘Find Yourself’ and ‘Face to Face’ are particularly intricately composed. The biggest influence, though, is painted all over the album cover. Artist, musician and co-owner of Ghost Box, Julian House can’t help but lend an ominous touch to proceedings and make ‘Hypnophobia’ a companion piece to Broadcast and The Focus Group’s ‘Witch Cults of the Radio Age’. For an album named after the fear of sleep, it seems particularly ominous that Gardner seems to be lulling us into his own curious dreamland.

Over four albums Canadian singer-songwriter Patrick Watson, backed by his eponymous band, has tread softly along the cardigan-indie path – breathy vocals, ethereal melodies, and wispy songs that sound in danger of vanishing into thin air. But ‘Love Songs For Robots’, ostensibly a meditation on how “the only thing left between us and robots is curiosity and inspiration”, sees Watson wrap the bones of his ideas in far more flesh and meat; it just sounds fuller. Gone too are the quirky experimentation and needless gimmicks, replaced by more solid ideas and heft – the Arcade Fire chorus of ‘Hearts’, the stylish shuffle of ‘Know That You Know’, the sweeping solos of ‘Good Morning Mr. Wolf’. If anything, you’re left feeling he hasn’t gone far enough, and too many tracks here retreat with a sad whimper when you expect them to soar. There’s no doubting Watson’s talent or craft – it’s his strongest collection of songs to date – he just needs to realise that sometimes, contrary to received wisdom, “less is more” shouldn’t be taken so literally.

A wholesale change of direction on your fifth record is always bound to present a little bit of risk, and whilst that’s not an accusation you could quite level at Ceremony this time around, there’s no question that there’s genuine bravery in the way they’ve approached ‘The L-Shaped Man’, which is bound to challenge their fanbase. These songs – inspired by a messy breakup for frontman Ross Farrar – aren’t necessarily any less visceral than the raw bursts of punk that the California outfit have spent the past decade making their calling card, but the method of delivery feels like a little bit of a left turn; these tracks are studies in seething resentment and reluctant restraint, and the emotional effect that follows is more often than not a gut punch. John ‘Speedo’ Reis of Hot Snakes and Rocket from the Crypt fame is behind the desk, and quite evidently so – his fingerprints are all over the guitar tone. That’s one of many shrewd choices on an intelligent record from an old hardcore band who’ve always been acutely aware of punk’s real gift of total freedom.

George Lewis Jr’s third album as Twin Shadow manages to sound dated to two entirely different eras, while doing neither much justice. The first, perhaps predictably given his previous two records (both released via 4AD, giving the Brooklyn-based singer all the indie cred he needed to broker a new deal with Warners), is the mid-80s po-faced pop of Phil Collins, Madonna and Huey Lewis, all dead-serious over-emoting, gated drums and glossy production; the second is the

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post-‘Drive’-soundtrack landscape of 2011 in which Lewis found initial success, itself in debt to that mid-80s aesthetic but seductively fresh enough at the time to remain alluring.

In 2015, though, both of these temporal callbacks grate if the source material isn’t up to scratch, and unfortunately ‘Eclipse’ suffers from slathering stodgy cake with sickly icing. Consequently, ‘To The Top’ is a tepid imaging of Foreigner covering ‘Baby Can I Hold You Tonight’, ‘Alone’ is College without

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the insouciance, and only ‘Old Love/New Love’ – itself a straight lift of Prince’s ‘I Wanna Be Your Lover’ that could do with more Prince and less Twin Shadow – offers any joy.

Occasionally there’s a hint that this album could be rescued by the hands of genuine charisma factories like Taylor Swift or the Haim sisters, but relying only on Lewis and his stagey, clenched-fist faux anguish to pull it through is a mistake: it leaves ‘Eclipse’ bumbling, bloated and disappointingly crass.

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In indie pop’s annuals of near misses you’ll find the past works of Nic Nell and certainly Rebekah Raa, both of whom were cruelly overlooked in 2008 – him pipped by the quickly fabled Esser and other boys making ‘wonky pop’; her and her danceable art group Stricken City a fraction too late for the indie disco boom. Rainer could be a project full of panic and the tacky emulation that comes with the pressure of needing-it-to-work-this-time, yet most of this debut album remains undistracted by

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Recalling Confield-era Autechre at Sean Booth and Rob Brown’s most punishing and most melodic, Holly Herndon’s debut album for 4AD is an LP that would feel comfortably at home had Warp’s Artificial Intelligence series continued into the 2000s. And I don’t say that lightly. From opener and recent single ‘Interference’, ‘Platform’ feels simultaneously fresh and yet part of a classic electronic lineage that also includes, amongst others, μ-Ziq, múm, Björk and, more recently, Balam Acab and The Knife. And while lumping current Stanford University PhD student Herndon in with Laurel Halo might form a neat gender-based narrative, the sounds on ‘Platform’ form a very different beast, placing much more emphasis on textures, grooves and out-and-out aggression. Key tracks: ‘Morning Sun’ with its gorgeous, glitchy dawn chorus, ‘Home’’s aching bass and fractured vocal interplay, and ‘An Exit’, an epic that exists on the outer borders of dance music and stadium-sized electronic pop which proves that machines, when deployed correctly, can have feelings too.

This may be her debut album, but Zhala has long been generating a giddy collection of cut and paste quotes that would put the most self-assured starlet into a spin. Already compared to familiarly out-there female artists – from Grimes to Robyn (who’s signed Zhala to her new record label) – Zhala Rifat’s crazed, vibrant take on avant-garde pop is going to turn heads. Opener ‘I’m in Love’ is the bold statement to that effect with its 4/4 bolted Balearic-tinged rhythms setting the eclectic tone for the alternative crusade that follows. Breezing between the ’80s glitterball of ‘Aerobic Lambada’ and the curious mix of panpipes and Dutch rave on ‘Prophet’, ‘Prince in the Jungle’ pushes Zhala’s unabashed pop vocals against squelching beats while ‘Me and My Borderline Friend in a Trance’ dials up the big, echoing dynamics. An album with an emphasis on imagination, Zhala’s lust for adventure isn’t in doubt. But for all the daydream ambition, a little focus could have made this more than a sporadically brilliant sequence of carefree left turns.

Beth Jeans Houghton, as an artist, is no more – welcome in her stead Du Blonde, the name by which the idiosyncratic Tynesider shall henceforth be known. Listening to ‘Welcome Back To Milk’ you can fully understand why Houghton felt a new identity was needed for this record – this is a musical reinvention that is altogether heavier, more band-centric, more diverse and more inventive than her former incarnation of skewed, magical pop, which quickly irritated. She wants this album to be seen as a debut, and it certainly feels like that. Opener ‘Black Flag’ is grinding and bass-heavy, while ‘Chips To Go’ has a vaguely eastern feel. Future Islands’ Samuel Herring appears to superb and theatrical effect on the bombastic, driven ‘Mind Is On My Mind’, while the album takes interesting turns on the showy waltz ‘After The Show’ and ‘Hunter’, which is the kind of power ballad you can imagine on the soundtrack of a US teen drama. Houghton wanted a new musical identity and in Du Blonde she’s swapped alt-pop whimsy for Karen O-ish gnarl.

Since 2010, Ruban Nielson’s career has been in perpetual forward motion. ‘Unknown Mortal Orchestra’ – his debut album – was a minor lo-fi classic, its woolly guitars, thick-cut bass and vocal distortions deftly crosscutting psych and indie rock, while follow-up, ‘II’ (he’s not been great on titles), gave his rougher edges a polish and drew attention to Nielson’s propensity for lyrical despair. ‘Multi-Love’ shuns themes of misery and isolation in favour of the bittersweet nature of togetherness, while embracing the rich strain of funk and R&B that has always simmered beneath UMO’s work. At its best it retains Nielson’s unique aesthetic brilliance, but colours in the borders with shades of The Delfonics (‘Like Acid Rain’), Sly And The Family Stone (‘Stage Or Screen’), Prince (Ur Life One Night) and Maggot Brain-era Funkadelic (‘Necessary Evil’, ‘Puzzles’). The result is an LP that draws from the past but never feels derivative – a complex, kaleidoscopic, warm and downright sexy joyride, which is tough not to consider as his best album to date.

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vogue ideas and a desperation to shift some serious units.

That isn’t to say that ‘Water’ is an avant-garde listen, or that is doesn’t resemble other contemplative pop records from time to time (Purity Ring in the manipulated vocals of ‘Nocturn’; Lana Del Ray on ‘Skin’), rather that Rainer’s approach to the male producer/female vocalist mould is more restrained than others. It works, too.

Nell pulls his punches where you expect him to crank out the usual

trap beat on the usual 303, while his electronics (best of all his glockenspiel) flutter about in the background. Casually Here – Nell’s producer moniker – says it all.

Raa – with lyrics about tricky love that firmly centres the record with a theme of pick-yourself-up – then dares to sing not in girlish sing-song but in a deep, breathy tone; that of an adolescent no more, but a proud woman. It’s a striking defiance that appears comfortable with an uncertain future.

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Most bands don’t make it to their sixth album without at least some sort of personnel change, stylistic crisis of confidence or a barrel-scraping best-of collection to bolster their Discogs page, so for Hot Chip to do exactly that, so unassumingly and with such grace, is perhaps a greater achievement than ‘Why Make Sense’ itself could ever be.

However, the consequence of such a steady output is that while their sixth record is an engaging, peppy and accomplished piece,

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There’s a sharp political edge to San Francisco synth punks POW! Along with song titles like ‘@ The Dock’ and ‘Cold Blooded Judge’, their debut album, last year’s ‘Hi Tech Boom’, was a scathing commentary on their hometown’s socio-economic woes, so it’s no surprise they have an ally in Castle Face Records’ head honcho and Thee Oh Sees frontman John Dwyer. And on ‘Fight Fire’ they certainly sound angry; the twelve tracks here rush by in a fog of fury, three of them barely making it past the minute mark. Buzzsaw guitars duel with heavy synths, and there’s a monotonous inevitability about the drums; you feel like they’d continue on through the apocalypse, banging out a non-stop, motorik beat. But at times the onslaught feels overwrought, and too many songs – most notably ‘Surrender’ and ‘2000 Now!’ – collapse under the weight of the squall. It’s a shame; the likes of ‘Liquid Daydream’ hit the sweet spot where sharp, crunching chords fizz with the right type of energy, yet don’t overstay their welcome. More restraint, and the rest would sound just as catchy.

The third album from LA musician Nosaj Thing is an absorbing, spacey, enveloping kind of electronica. You could almost call it psychedelic; not in the traditionally accepted (musical) sense of the word, but in the sense that it wordlessly conveys and creates feelings that are otherworldly. Other than those with scant vocals (‘Cold Stares’ is vaguely soulful and brushed with hip-hop), no one track discernibly stands out from another here; this is very much a cohesive collection, almost like a single piece of music with a number of different movements. Thus there are no real surprises to be found of ‘Fated’, although it feels like there aren’t meant to be. It’s a kind of incidental record, which if you’re in the wrong mood might pass you by, but if it catches you right has a genuinely hypnotic, entrancing effect; each careful detail becoming apparent and forming part of its complex texture. Listen to this album through headphones, staring out of the window on a long train journey, and you’ll appreciate its understated splendour.

A record released under a moniker as twee as Bernard + Edith can’t help but instil a sense of mortal dread of its doubtless insipid, vapid, soundtrack-for-a-mobile-phone-advert folksy fare. Mercifully though, Manchester electronic pop duo Greta Edith Carroll and Nick Bernard Delap – the latter formerly of Egyptian Hip Hop – use their cutesy, anachronistic middle names solely as a mischievous piece of misdirection, throwing everybody off the scent of the reverb-laden, 4AD-imbued aesthetic of their debut LP. From This Mortal Coil and Dead Can Dance through to Dif Juz and Cocteau Twins, there’s often little to separate ‘Jem’ from its mid-eighties influences – ‘Crocodile’ comes off like a lost album track from ‘Treasure’ – but Carroll and Delap have tried not to lose themselves entirely in the past. The dark-hued synth-pop of ‘Heartache’, for instance, brings the duo up to date via Swedish contemporaries Fever Ray and iamiamiwhoami. The crux, though, is that ‘Jem’ is an enjoyable listen mainly for its first-rate reference points, rather than its individuality.

Róisín Murphy has returned after eight years out with her third solo album, and with it banishes a few demons in a way that only she knows how. ‘Hairless Toys’ is an expertly crafted slice of dinner party house music, blending soul and dance influences into an intoxicating and sophisticated tonic. Unearthing the album’s roots in last year’s ‘Mi Senti’ EP, sung entirely in Italian, it is easy to trace a sultry European electro sound dominating the first half of the album. ‘Gone Fishing’ combines inky beats with twinkling keys, for an exclusive twilight pool party, while ‘Evil Eyes’ is all lugubrious 8-bit funk. As Murphy’s vocals meander beautifully, though, they unravel an increasingly political and class conscious voice, particularly on ‘Exploitation’ where she provocatively asks “who’s exploiting who?” Then, just as the lounge vibe starts to dominate, she throws in some twisted country influences in ‘Exile’ and ‘Unputdownable’ to keep listeners on their toes. Understated, occasionally unobtrusive, but nevertheless ‘Hairless Toys’ is a confident and stylish return.

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there’s little to distinguish it from their recent previous work: accordingly, we’re served a combination of delightfully loose, rubbery bangers (‘Huarache Nights’), whimsically sentimental balladeering (‘White Wine & Fried Chicken’) and lightly sautéed dance-pop catchiness (‘Started Right’), all delivered with doe-eyed sincerity, warmly idiosyncratic whimsy and straight-up pop joy, to consistently satisfying (if slightly familiar) effect.

But that’s not to say Hot Chip

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have entirely started treading water: there are some neatly understated experiments here in the form of guest raps, Stevie Wonder clavinet licks and the quasi-protest song ‘Need You Now’ that flow unobtrusively around the rest of the record.

Equally, though, there’s still little escape from the seasoned Hot Chippiness of it all, which, of course, is no bad thing – it’s just that the problem with being routinely excellent is that, eventually, it becomes the norm.

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On both his self-titled debut and its follow-up, ‘MCII’, Mikal Cronin impressed with a deft, intelligent take on garage rock that set him apart in a frankly crowded marketplace. The latter, especially, made it seem as if he was genuinely coming into his own as a songwriter and stepping out of the shadow cast by his previous collaborator Ty Segall, which is why it’s a little surprising that only a couple of years later, the law of diminishing return already seems to have set in

Uruguayan-born Juan Wauters, so legend goes, moved to New York in his teens and turned to music to fight the loneliness he encountered upon his arrival. He needn’t have worried about settling in, however, having found indie adoration with the Beets within a couple of years, and a solo deal with Captured Tracks soon after. Where his debut LP, last year’s ‘N.A.P. North American Poetry’, drew on the sprawling, rough-edged outsider approach of Daniel Johnston, ‘Who, Me?’ is a much more polished effort that might be more accurately filed next to Dylan, Browne or Zevon, while he manages to tease out the influence of his native country’s Canto popular on this album for the first time. The everyday is still the focus of Wauters’ microscope as he places the daily comings and goings of NYC in his Petri dish. ‘Woodside, Queens,’ ‘She Might Get Shot’ and ‘Grey Matter’ are 2015 urban tales filtered through that hazy, late-60s acoustic sound. The raw aptitude is there, and with a little more time in the studio, Wauters might manage to drag himself up from good to great.

Strange instruments, breathy European vocals and lovingly recreated Joe Meek-style production – that’s right, this is another in a long line of swirling soundscapes from the ever-reliable folks at… Fire? Yup. Don’t let the cover art fool you – the debut from Swedish trio Death And Vanilla is not the latest Ghost Box release (you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise). D&V do plough a similar furrow to the likes of Nottingham’s The Soundcarriers, though – indebted to obscure soundtracks (‘Moogskogen’ is total Wicker Man), sixties exotica, and Stereolab in the prime of their wow and flutter. Its poppiest moments, like the gossamer pop of ‘California Owls’ could almost be Beach House, at least until it descends into a two-minute cascade of bird noises. It’s enchanting stuff, for sure, but it’s only on the motorik folk of ‘Hidden Reverse’ or ‘Follow the Light’’s uncharacteristically pure sunshine pop – the moments when D&V go beyond their influences – that ‘Wild Things’ truly sounds as transcendent as the band wants it to.

Warm Soda’s ‘Symbolic Dream’ (their third album since 2013) is the sound of eternal youth; of twenty-somethings-who-are-really-thirty-somethings with ripped up Levis and unkempt locks mock-brawling over beers; of carefree exuberance in the reddening ‘noon sun; of a Mustang full of mates beating drums on the dashboard to a killer blast from the AM radio. Punky opener ‘I Wanna Know Her’ epitomises their singular ’70s aesthetic; pepped and jubilant, its scuzzy familiar riff struts along like former Frisco act Girls at their most desert glam; there’s a worn-in hook at every turn and it’s wrapped up in a feeling of infectious giddiness. Band leader Matthew Melton – who previously spearheaded trippy-rock band Bare Wires – nods to Marc Bolan in the same way defunct Chicagoans Smith Westerns did on their stellar sophomore LP ‘Dye It Blonde’, especially on ‘I Know The Cure’; his coo is calm and eloquent, and the melodies keep coming like incessant whac-a-moles. Except we’re not fighting it; just juicin’ back another and enjoying the ride.

“I was all for being real, but if I don’t believe then no one will,” snarls Mackenzie Scott on opener ‘Strange Hellos’. With the amps cranked up, ‘Sprinter’’s introduction is worlds away from the skeletal backing Torres’ life-tainted growl received on her eponymous debut album in 2013. She continues to be a sucker for sadness, but PJ Harvey’s Robert Ellis and Ian Olliver play behind her unholy roar with a venomous chug – one that wouldn’t sound entirely out of place on a Hole record. The choppy waters calm from there and it’s a blessing, as Scott’s raw lyrics regain their grip and steal back centre stage. On ‘A Proper Polish Welcome’ she returns to her first album’s sonic aesthetic, coming across all contemplative over washy strums as if she’s spent the night staring blankly at the dark with only her unreeling memories for company. The result is hypnotic and affecting, but it’s bettered by the record’s centrepiece, ‘Cowboy Guilt’. Here, the formulaic country sound of her Georgia roots is given a minimal futuristic makeover, which sets the direction a game-changing third LP.

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with ‘MCIII’. The album’s light, airy production

and clever blend of acoustic and electric guitar work – the latter being something of a Cronin signature, and the pairing reminicent of The Shins more than once here – are present and correct throughout, but beyond that, he sounds as if he might be running out of ideas. Opening one-two ‘Turn Around’ and ‘Made My Mind Up’ are pleasant and well-constructed, but lack the tightness of pace that ran through ‘MCII’;

elsewhere, meanwhile, the album’s closing half sees tracks numbered one to six, but there isn’t a great deal of evident sonic cohesion.

There’s still flashes of brilliance – ‘Say’ is an enjoyably loose, freewheeling guitar romp, whilst closer ‘Circle’ is scored through with pretty melodies – but otherwise, there’s a strong case here for suggesting that Cronin might have benefited from an extended break before jumping straight back into the saddle with a third album.

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2013’s ‘Weird Sister’ was a defining moment for Joanna Gruesome in terms of endurance – a self-conscious, emotionally substantial work of youthful grievance that dispelled the myth of young naivety, it earned them critical reverence while remaining an incredibly vital aspect of the DIY music scene.

Fortunately, not that much has changed since then – everything that prevailed on the band’s debut LP has been heightened here with the help of Hookworms’ MJ on production;

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both their innate pop sensibility and sporadic abrasion, not to mention their enviable propensity for melody and nuance.

Lyrically, the group explores new, surreal territory, the contents of which are often indistinguishable through Alanna McCardle’s customary yelps. The familiarity of personal tragedy is still present in songs like ‘Separate Bedrooms’ and ‘I Don’t Wanna Relax’, however, while opener ‘Last Year’ reaches dizzying heights, its belligerent punk

exterior sublimely counteracted by hazy, melodic optimism.

At just over 20 minutes long, ‘Peanut Butter’ is much more concise than its predecessor, its comparative brevity sounding noticeably hurried yet working in their favour. It never wastes time with effusive tricks, with the very occasional lavish guitar solo only there to mock trad masculine rock’s tedious bullshittery.

Devoid of pretence, ‘Peanut Butter’’s sonic impulsiveness is wonderfully chaotic.

Albums

Visualisation and imagination were once two musical components intrinsically interlocked within the constructs of pop music. However, as times, tastes and technologies have moved on, a more inward-facing, vain, constructed idea – or notion – of imagination has been a more favoured form of creativity. Often replacing a more outward-looking, experimental approach and, on occasion, becoming a fleeting, throwaway musical plasticity based on what Likes, Shares and traffic it can garner. By doing so it has eclipsed the very literate and cinematic approach of true musical imagination, creating places, people and sprawling worlds for them to

operate and exist in. The Eccentronic Research Council are a group that really hammer home how imaginatively stagnant some pop music has become in recent years. That said, to say this is just pop music would skirt over the head-fuck brilliance of all the other genres it so flawlessly flies through (from space rock and haunted fairground music to drowning techo). The brilliant thing about the ERC is that there is a knowing quality to them and this record; should they want to put out a club banger of an album or indeed an esoteric sci-fi synth drone record, they could do so with both ease and quality, but their approach reaches for something higher, something

the eccentronic research councilJohnny rocket, narcissist and music machine... I’m your Biggest Fan

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more pure and truly innovative in its experimentations. Something creepy.

Playing like a kitchen sink rock opera-come-nightmare, this is a concept album based in Valhalla Dale, Sheffield (a fictional location) and it tells the tale of an obsessed music fan (as played out by the wonderful Silk actor Maxine Peake) who is in love with a band called the Moonlandingz (a fictional group that has actually been created within the record and features Lias and Saul from The Fat White Family as key contributing members). It’s a tale of an obsession that goes sour and the unfurling of the story is gloriously cinematic in its tense evolution as the narrative plays out like a

deconstructive mental collapse, as everything goes a bit fucking west.

Such is the quality of the lyrics – and Peake’s sublime, precise delivery of them – and the unique narrative concept that it’s almost easy to forget the music on this album, which you shouldn’t because it’s consistently brilliant. Heavy on synth experimentations, the it is not only a seamless accompaniment to the story but it creates a realm for it to live in – when the story is set in a club, for example, the ERC have produced the music that can be heard playing in the background. They haven’t just made a record with sounds here – they’ve made an entire dazzling world.

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Live

When Laura Marling swapped London for Los Angeles two years ago, and came back late last year with a new record – March’s ‘Short Movie’ – that was scored through with palpable Californian atmosphere and riddled with lyrical complexities, the honest truth of the matter was that she’d done so not a moment too soon. After taking an enormous stride forward – musically and thematically – with her 2010 album ‘I Speak Because I Can’, there’s a genuine argument to suggest that she’d effectively been treading water since. That’s not to do down either LP ‘A Creature I Don’t Know’ – subtly inflected as it was to the Americana of her core influences – or ‘Once I Was an Eagle’, the ambition of which was never in doubt after it opened with a gorgeous four-

track, fifteen-minute suite. It was just that you felt that Marling might be falling into the trap of familiarity.

‘Short Movie’ largely torpedoed those fears, and she opens tonight’s set – in the totally fitting surroundings of Manchester’s beautiful, recently-restored Albert Hall – in almost aggressive fashion, as new cuts ‘Howl’ and ‘Walk Alone’ segue smartly into the aforementioned suite from ‘Eagle’. “Thanks for being so patient through a twenty-one minute opening song,” she says, knowing full well that the setlist is front-loaded deliberately, to deliver an unmistakably sharp reminder of Marling’s raw ability.

If there’s been a progression on record with ‘Short Movie’, though, Marling has finally matched it live.

Previously, she’d routinely apologise for the abject state of her stage banter before going on to ramble anyway; tonight, she squeezes the former in later, but otherwise keeps the audience interaction sparse.

As recently as a couple of years ago, it’d be a rare Marling show that didn’t have her aborting at least one song, whether because of nervous giggles, cramp or something else entirely; tonight, though, there’s a welcome air not only of professionalism, but of bolshy confidence in the way that the current live band have worked out the set.

‘The Muse’, probably the earliest point at which Marling began to dabble with the affected American accent that runs through ‘Short Movie’, becomes a vivacious country jam, while ‘Master Hunter’ is

downright confrontational. ‘False Hope’, a stormy PJ Harvey-flecked number that’s amongst the new album’s highlights, is carried off with belligerent verve, and yet there’s intelligent balance to the songs played – the delicate one-two of ‘Goodbye England (Covered in Snow)’ and a brilliantly basic cover of traveling classic ‘Blues Run the Game’ is a masterstroke.

Marling, at twenty-five, is already eight years into her career, but she’s never looked quite as comfortable and confident as a live performer as she does tonight. With so much of ‘Short Movie’ concerned with mysticism, it doesn’t feel trite to chalk up that transformation to something in the Los Angeles water – at last, she’s as assured on stage as on record.

Laura MarlinAlber Hall Manchester

24/04/2014

writer: Joe goggins

PHotogrAPHer: dAnieL quesAdA

loudandquiet.com 44

A candlelit 19th Century church is a slightly ironic venue for Jessica Pratt, given that her music sounds perfect for a séance. The bleach-blonde San Franciscan songstress is joined tonight by Cyrus Gengras on electric guitar and together the pair fill the Grade I listed building with delicate, spectral folk, the sideman’s subtly-treated textures the perfect counterpoint for Pratt and her alternatively-tuned melancholia. The songs are invariably gorgeous; the descending melody of ‘Night Faces’ makes the hair on the back of the neck stand up as Pratt implores herself to “cry no tears,” while ‘I’ve Got a Feeling’ could belong to Nick Drake were he a lovelorn Californian girl with a beautiful quiver. Barely an hour goes by before Pratt strums the second and final track of her encore before ghosting back into the night, her supernatural talent confirmed.

Nadine Shah, and the darkly beautiful world that she inhabits, are monochrome in a very rich sense of the word – multi-layered and intensely powerful. Standing side-on to the audience, her voice is front and centre of this dark melodrama, carrying with it menace, poetry and pain that instantly makes you realise where all those PJ Harvey and Nick Cave comparisons come from. It’s a heavyweight performance tonight, at times clanging and ground-shakingly loud. Yet Shah’s intense musical persona contrasts surprisingly with the performer we see between songs; here is a woman whose sharp-witted and relaxed inter-song quips wouldn’t be out of place in a comedy club. It’s engaging and entertaining stuff, but when she dives into the dark fire-and-ice maelstrom of set-closer ‘Runaway’, it’s clear where this artist’s forte truly lies.

Once again showing a predilection for playing in the shadows, A Place to Bury Strangers are barely visible through the abundance of dry ice and projected strobe lightening that accompanies their harsh wall of sound; it’s a sensory overload, and the New York band sound typically discordant tonight. The earplugs provided are necessary on APTBS’s kaleidoscopic, distorted opener ‘We’ve Come So Far’, and it takes front-man Oliver Ackermann a mere three songs before hurling his guitar at bassist Dion Lunadon. Later he shuffles the amp to the front of the stage – as though it wasn’t deafening enough. The encore sees the band navigate to the middle of the crowd with a drum machine in tow, culminating in an experimental cacophony of guitar squall and feedback – the results of which are masochistically disorientating.

Appearing in sweatshirts – Christian names emblazoned across their chests – Will Butler and his group arrive onstage like an alt-rock glee club. And in a sense, that’s the spirit of the show they provide – a thrilling, peppy showcase, with the four members aligned at the front of the stage. Half the songs played are taken from Butler’s recent debut album; the rest are made up from previously unreleased material, and there’s a lovely Magnetic Fields cover, too. When these songs bleed together – as on ‘Madonna Can’t Save Me Now’/’Something’s Coming’ – it’s electrifying. A firebrand at the heart of Arcade Fire, Butler’s enthusiasm seems to infect everything it touches, whether that’s his music, his band or tonight’s crowd. It makes for a relentless performance, which leaves everyone sated and beaming with joy.

Jessica Pratt St. John’s on Bethnal Green London

08/04/2015

writer: JameS F. thomPSon

nadine Shahoslo, hackney, London

16/04/2015

writer: ChriS watkeyS

a Place to Bury StrangersBelgrave, Leeds

03/04/2015

writer: hayLey SCott

PhotoGraPher: Danny Payne

will Butlerking’s Cross Scala, London

22/04/2015

writer: tom FenwiCk

PhotoGraPher: DanieL QueSaDa

Live

Singing Pictures

What do you think of when you think of Slade? I am guessing it’s the sound of Noddy Holder screaming ‘It’s Christmas!’ out of every shopping centre speaker from roughly the 15th of November to the 25th of December every year. While ‘Merry Xmas, Everybody’ might have started out as a fun festive song, it has since become a legitimate reason to disembowel yourself in WHSmith.

This is an unfortunate injustice because Slade are actually a brilliant band with tons of excellent tunes. 1972’s ‘Slayed?’ is a contender for the greatest ever glam album, with hits like ‘Gudbuy t’Jane’ alongside super duper deep cuts like ‘How D’You Ride?’ (Slade had an affinity for apostrophes). Holder’s unique screech, Lea’s overblown bass, Don Powell’s doziness and Dave Hill’s unstoppable haircut still add up to 34 minutes of glammy goodness.

How could they follow up such a stonker? Their heels were already impossibly high, Holder’s face already heroically ugly and the band’s Brummieness close to critical-mass. Ex-Animal bassist Chas Chandler suggested they do what all good bands used to do: star in a film. Slade, not exactly shrinking violets, said yes.

Slade In Flame, released in 1974, is

a bit unusual even in the bizarre world of band-films, and not what you might expect from a band known for their comic overtones. For a start, they don’t play themselves but rather a band called Flame (I am guessing this was so they could dress up in outfits that look like flames, which they do). Also, unlike so many other band films, it actually features a serious storyline and, get this, some believable acting from the band themselves.

Anyway, to the film itself: we start with Dave Hill playing at a wedding in a pub band fronted by a chap called Jack Daniels. As soon as he gets on camera, Hill lifts up a girl’s skirt using the neck of his guitar – the first of many acts of casual sexual harassment that let you know that yes, this film was made in the 1970s. After the ensuing punch up, Hill and his cohorts head off to another gig where they run into The Undertakers, a band that travels around in a Hearse and features Noddy Holder on lead vocals (which he delivers from inside a coffin).

Eager to get one up on the competition, Jack Daniels’ band padlock Holder inside his coffin, leaving him imprisoned and unable to burst out for The Undertakers’ big finale. This, of course, leads to another punch up and a car chase

through the night. It must be said that this film is somewhat of a PR nightmare for the seventies, littered as it is with brawls, groping and brown objects.

Let’s deal with that right now – this film has opened my eyes to just how, well, brown everything looked in the ’70s. It is as though someone has dipped the whole decade in tea, like at school when you wanted to make your crappy version of the Magna Carta look old.

Anyway, after the fight, two separate bands become one, forming Flame (aka Slade). Immediately the music gets great as Flame storm the charts with tracks like ‘How Does It Feel’ and ‘Far Far Away’ (my personal favourite Slade track).

These tracks don’t sound like 1972 Slade; they aren’t simply snarled stompers that shout about stuff that doesn’t entirely make sense. No, these tracks have a bit more to them. The musical palette is more varied with organs, acoustic guitars and horns making an appearance, while the lyrics are deeper and convey a sense of loss and longing. This is Slade showing that they’re more than a glam-gimmick: they are artists with something to say.

But while Flame are hitting the top of the charts a second story emerges – one of corruption. Flame’s original

manager – a cockney crook with an interest in greyhounds – comes back to stake a claim in the band from their new manager, a rather smooth character with the sort of posh accent that immediately signposts evil intentions.

Ultimately the strains of success and the problems of poor management cause Flame to burn out (sorry), leaving the members longing for their old lives. Luckily though justice is served and both managers get screwed over themselves: the cockney by losing the band (they quit), the posh one by having his daughter abducted (which seems fair). Also Jack Daniels gets his toes cut off with a spade, which is pretty brutal.

Oddly enough, in real life Slade went on to pursue the kind of commercialism that the film warns against, releasing a string of albums aimed at getting sales in the US rather than making meaningful music. But no matter: Slade In Flame is one of the best band films there is, and the soundtrack showcases a group at the top of their game. So, next November when you hear that famous Christmas caterwaul and are about to take the name of Slade in vain remember they were once a serious band with actual artistic merit.

Slade In Flame (1974)

Writer: AndreW AnderSon

loudandquiet.com 46

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TABLOID TennIs The comment boards on Hypnodog ceLeBrITy AucTIOn Famous people’s old crap

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20d

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20dDave Cameron @TheBigSociety2010RT if you can’t wait for the season 5 of #Gameofthrones!!!!

Dave Cameron @TheBigSociety2010Bet @EdMillibandLabour doesn’t even know what #Gameofthrones is! #wecantallbeTHRONIES #game #of #thrones

Dave Cameron @TheBigSociety2010GAME OF THRONES!!!!!!!

Dave Cameron @TheBigSociety2010Who’s you’re favourite character, then? #Aragorn #Gameofthrones

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“I just started reading this, got two paragraphs in, and thought

what the eff am I doing?! I’m voluntarily reading THIS!

Shame on me!from Concerned.com

“Come on DM - how can you do a story on this bull plop and

completely ignore the talent of young Isaac Waddington and his

stunning performance?”from Shortie

“Shame on Ant and Dec for playing along with this farce and pretending to be

hypnotised and sent to sleep by a dog”

from Dolly Diamond

“What next? A hypnotoad?”from Kennydk

“Absolute rubbish !!! The dog was not even looking

at them !!!!”from Grandma

“I’m sure they’d all wake up pretty fast if that dog farts!!”

from mjchristie100

“What a load of poo.”from Hannah123

The Metro

“That was as fake as Amanda Holden’s face.”

from Russell Carey

“The dog’s owner should NOT and NEVER should wear her

eyebrows too thin.”from Melvin King

“Of course it was fake... The home audience would

be hypnotized aswell, wouldn’t they!”

from Gavin Gavikeeno Keenan

“Christ BGT has gone down hill, but I have to say, the dog

hypnosim was worth watching. Am I saying I believed it? Yes, I

think I am.”from Kennydk

“He’ll be a judge next year!”from Realsense

“After watching this I tried to get my pug to hypnotise my

sister. He decided to drop a log. Therefore, FAKE!”

from squintybuns

“Looks like I’ve misjudged this one, I’ve got 500 Hypnodog

t-shirts made up for the market next weekend”from Larrypints

Brand new (still in the box) streaming company TIDAL

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For fuck’s sake, Ian! At least tell me you’ve all got

pants on

(yeah

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(Absolutely

Pants?

If you still don’t know what Hypnodog is, drop this paper now. you’re winning. But so you know, it’s dog that hypnotises people in the name of annual horror fest Britain’s Got Talent. Articles have been written about it.