interview

Dry Cleaning: the London group uniting murky post-punk, Meghan Markle and really weird YouTube comments

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Photo credit: Hanna Katrina

For those who possess both the requisite drunken bravado and burning desire to maul Robbie Williams’ back catalogue, karaoke parties are rarely the start of something beautiful. Mistakes are made, memories are lost, and some traitor inevitably captures the whole tawdry scene on video. When Lewis Maynard, Tom Dowse and Nick Buxton – old friends whose previous bands had crossed paths in London – united to belt out some Deftones bangers, however, it proved to be the unlikely catalyst to start a new band together.

Continue reading at NME

Nine Songs: Bat For Lashes

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When Natasha Khan announced a new album informed by the baby pinks and teals of 80s music and cinema, it would have been easy to sneer at it as the latest cultural power-grab for nostalgia, the aural equivalent of a New Coke can left in shot a little too long. That it would be a costume to dress up in for the night rather than something, you know, authentic. As it turns out, Lost Girls is a phenomenal record, which should come as little surprise for an artist whose just about to release her fifth on the bounce as Bat For Lashes (six if you count the Sexwitch LP, which you absolutely should). But that’s almost beside the point.

The point is that costumes and make-up are ways of telling stories; when we strike a pose, we reach towards something higher than the everyday motions learned by rote, which is ultimately what Khan does best. Each of her albums carries a concept, and yet even when they’re playing dress-up – quite literally in the case of Pearl, the blonde-wigged chaos twin she built into the Two Suns narrative – they’re telling us something about the artist, about ourselves.

Continue reading at The Line of Best Fit

A Flower Bloomed: Conan Gray Interviewed

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The pop star has barely been on stage for a few seconds before the screaming begins. At the front of the venue, diehard fans have cast off any prior nerves about seeing their idol in person; now all that tightly coiled energy is sprung into cheering, crying, jumping up and down, singing every word back to every song.

I close my eyes and picture the scene: BTS at Wembley, perhaps, or One Direction at the San Siro. When I open them again, the small stage is dominated by a slightly awkward young man, school tie wrapped around his head, occupying an early afternoon slot at Brighton’s 140-capacity Komedia Studio.

And it’s sensational.

Continue reading at Clash (cover feature)

Mirrored Bodies: An Interview With Hans Appelqvist

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If we enjoy mirroring the sex, sadness or fear of the bodies we see on the screen – if we imagine ourselves in their bodies, experiencing their orgasms and heartbreak – what emotional value do we acquire from some of the more openly distressing scenes that these kind of films portray? Is it sheer curiosity at the vicarious participation in something transgressive? “Yeah, definitely,” Appelqvist says. “That’s a strong idea in the piece: that the role of art should be to provide an experimental playground where you can basically do anything, since it’s not hurting anyone. Like Visitor Q: it puts all these wrong, immoral, terrible things into this film universe, and we get a chance to explore our feelings towards them.”

At the end of Have You Ever Seen Visitor Q? little has been resolved, though Peter’s mentality appears to have shifted. The key distinction, Appelqvist suggests, is that transgressive art can be a positive, exhilarating experience when it’s done right. It doesn’t have to be an ordeal. “There are no traumas in my life that I need to work through. I don’t need therapeutic help from art in that way. So for me it’s about entertainment: let’s just put these ideas together and see what happens.” Most of all, art should remain a vehicle for pushing ideas in a way that keeps opening audience’s minds, to relocate our gaze toward the gaps of light that emerge between our fingers, still anxiously shielding our eyes from the world’s horrors. “It should be playful, that’s the whole thing. You should have fun with your body and mind, talk to people, have sex with people. Enjoy it.”

Continue reading at The Quietus

“I always get excited by the idea of adventure”: DiS Meets Ludovico Einaudi

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Photo credit: Ray Tarantino

We’ve stopped briefly on our walk through the Italian countryside, on the way to a local restaurant, because Ludovico Einaudi wants to eat some flowers. He beckons the press over and begins to speak about the qualities of this particular specimen, encouraging us to pick a few to garnish our salads and risottos later. Various members of the international press in attendance begin collecting them, stuffing a handful in pockets and the occasional one or two in their mouths. I chew on a few petals and watch as the composer sets off again, down the road to find the next adventure. Are they poisonous? Nobody asks. Today Einaudi is the pied piper of Piedmont, and we follow him wherever he takes us.

As it turns out the 63-year-old is an excellent walking companion, which is exactly what makes his new album cycle Seven Days Walking such a compelling work of art. Inspired by a succession of mountain walks taken during the darker months, the project is intended to illustrate the capricious nature of both the environment around us and our perception of it, each subject to change at any moment, however much we grasp at commonalities. If it sounds like the work of an experimental artist on the fringes of modern classical music, that may belie the fact that Ludovico Einaudi is something of a superstar – well beyond the remit of where his genre typically extends.

Continue reading at Drowned in Sound

Primordial Gods: DiS Meets Faith Eliott

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In the music videos for ‘Lilith’ and ‘Loomis’, the first two singles to be taken from Faith Eliott’s debut album Impossible Bodies, a glorious and near-constant duel plays out between the sparkling and the mundane. Flashes of electric pink and lightning gold illuminate the washed-out scenes around them, and we taste both senses of the word “impossible”: not only as frustration towards something that can never be achieved, but also as something thrillingly beyond the limitations of the present. We live in our own impossible bodies, but we also yearn towards wilder ones.

Continue reading at Drowned in Sound

Hold On Tight, Darling: Amanda Palmer Interviewed

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Photo credit: Khan & Selesnick

“I’m not gonna match you,” Amanda Palmer once sang on ‘Ampersand’, a paean to the importance of retaining your own identity, “’cause I’ll lose my voice completely.” On the 16th June 2015, the day that Donald Trump announced to the world that he would be running for US president, Palmer was already anticipating a new voice shaping the next chapter of her life. Her son would be born exactly three months later.

It wouldn’t be the last time that a major political event juxtaposed with personal events in the artist’s life; more recently, her new album ‘There Will Be No Intermission’ was recorded as the Kavanaugh trial was playing out across the world. “We were literally glued to our phones in between takes, watching this cosmic battle of the sexes play out in Washington DC,” she tells me over the phone from upstate New York. “I’ll never be able to separate those events, the way I’ll never be able to separate the arrival of my child and the arrival of Donald Trump in my life; they showed up in my life at the same time.”

Continue reading at Clash

In Conversation: Calpurnia

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“That Calpurnia led a modest double life never dawned on me. The idea that she had a separate existence outside our household was a novel one…”

As the black matriarch in Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, Calpurnia seems light years away from the four teenage kids from Vancouver who carry her name. They’re young in a modern way, as one would hope: still goofy and wild, still piecing the world together between gym class and Fortnite. Nonetheless, just as Scout becomes fascinated with the scenes beyond her housekeeper’s gaze, the band have had to negotiate the world’s obsession with their own second lives.

After bringing their first singles together with two new tracks for a debut collection titled – what else? – ‘Scout EP’, the quartet are starting to get attention for all the right reasons. They’ve been picked up by Canadian indie label Royal Mountain, with Transgressive covering distribution across the UK and Europe. Their live shows are getting hot reviews across the board. Weezer even tweeted to say how much they loved the band’s cover of ‘Say It Ain’t So’. In other words, they’re proving to be a whole lot more than a casual side-project for their lead singer, Hollywood actor and Stranger Things star Finn Wolfhard.

Continue reading at Clash

We Love EU: Any Other

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The lover’s body is a constant source of fascination, but most of all when it is beyond touch, almost beyond memory. What is it about the physical terrain of the body that demands geographical expression? “I have flown the distance of your body from side to side of your ivory coast,” Jeanette Winterson wrote. “I know the forests where I can rest and feed. I have mapped you with my naked eye and stored you out of sight.” At the end of a relationship, as borderlines smudge and X-marked treasures are erased from sight altogether, we long for the stability of those lines. On Two, Geography, the second album from Italian artist Any Other, they remain painfully unfixed.

Continue reading at Drowned in Sound

“I’m not afraid to be vulnerable”: DiS Meets Half Waif

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Sifting through the embers of a year, extinguished across all but a few scattered patches of colour or warmth, we find ourselves longing for either the fire or the ash. To remember the vibrancy of our hurts as brightly as the healing pleasures that allayed them, however briefly; or else to stub it out, to usher in the comfort of a charcoal totality that doesn’t hurt this much. Listening to ‘Lavender Burning’, the heartbreaking introduction to what might be Half Waif’s first masterpiece, neither suffices. It is a record that lives and breathes the ‘strange kind of loving’ that occupies the embers, the infinite split between love and loss.

Continue reading at Drowned in Sound