Fusing a global array of funky, psychedelic sounds, London-based quartet Los Bitchos has crafted the soundtrack to strange days and weird nights shared with your friends, where it seems like anything can happen. Their debut album – fittingly called Let the Festivities Begin! – is comprised of instrumental rock bangers with cheeky titles like “Tripping at a Party” and “Lindsay Goes to Mykanos.” The latter is a nod to the reality series Lindsay Lohan’s Beach Club.
“We’ve always had that sunshine, tropical sheen with an edge of deranged-ness. I think that’s been there from the get-go,” says Guitarist Serra Petale on a recent video call. “Sound-wise, we really cemented ourselves in the studio because that was the first time that we all recorded together in the same room and we were able to really get behind the production-side of things.”
Petale and bassist Josefine Jonsson had known each other for years through a mutual friend. Nic Crawshaw came into the fold after the band had formed and put out a call on Facebook for a permanent drummer. “Up until that point, we were getting our friends and stuff to fill in for gigs,” says Petale. But\ it’s the story of how Petale and keytarist Augustina Ruiz befriended each other that says a lot about Los Bitchos’ vibe.
The two had run into each other around town, but an encounter at a party cemented their friendship. “I had fallen into a body of water and I was wet and Augustina was really kind to me and she helped me dry my sock and shoe and we were talking for the rest of the party,” Petale recalls as her bandmates, who have all joined in the call from their respective homes in London, laugh in the background. “She was great. We really hit it off from there.”
In a bit of happenstance, the band was able to connect with Alex Kapranos of Franz Ferdinand to produce the album after he caught them live. “We wanted to promptly go into the studio and we thought that we would just ask him,” says Petale, adding that they had only “semi-met” him at the show a few weeks earlier. “The worst he can say is no. But, he didn’t. He said yes!”
“It happened really quick. One minute, he’s saying yes and then the next minute we’re having a meeting with him at our manager’s house and then weeks later we’re in the studio with him,” Petale adds. Those first sessions resulted in the band’s previously released singles, “Pista (Fresh Start)” and “The Link Is About to Die.” Later on, they would go on to record the full-length.
“He really transformed the album. He put a lot of himself into it, and his ideas, they’re just so creative, and they come from such good and clever place,” says Petale. “The way that he would explain ideas and why things can go somewhere or why he can turn this structure around on its head or working on little parts of the songs, he put so much of himself on the record. Again, he invested as much love and time as we all did, which I think made the record that much more special.”
The collaboration resulted in friendship as well. “It was really nice to get to know him and become mates,” says Petale. “It’s a nice thing to have in your life.”
Photo Credit: Tom Mitchell
It would take some time, though, for Let the Festivities Begin! to come to life. They had finished a good chunk of the album in early 2020, with Petale and Crawshaw recording some of the final percussion overdubs just prior to the initial COVID-19 lockdown. “Then the rest of the guitar overdubs and synth sounds and things all happened gradually whenever people were allowed to get together,” says Crawshaw.
Overall, the band members estimate that it took at least a year to make the album— “with very big gaps in between when no one was allowed to do anything,” Crawshaw adds.
Yes, that did make it a bit of a frustrating experience. “With any record, you either want to feel like you’re constantly working on it or you just want it to be finished,” says Petale. “You want to put it out because it’s a body of work that we’ve all been working so hard on.”
But, adds Petale, “There were other issues in life at the time. It’s just the way that it was and it happened how it happened and now it’s finished and we’re super happy with how it turned out.”
Some people find Kali Ma to be enormously fearsome and dangerous to mess with, while others find her empowering. South London-based Lauren Dejey loves the labyrinthine perspectives and possibilities yielded by a goddess so mired in myth and magic, and draws on some big goddess energy on her debut EP Kali Ma.
“She’s both [empowering and fearsome], like every woman. Creation, destruction… We are so powerful and that can be scary to some people, but we also bring life and warmth which is the incredible duality of her and us. She is the antithesis of people-pleasing, being walked over, fitting in a box and being polite and quiet,” Dejey explains. “I found out about Kali only after I’d finished this EP, [but] I was so drawn to the power she embodies. What a Goddess.”
The five-track album rumbles up from the pit of Dejey’s broken heart to emerge triumphantly into the world. Her themes are not new: opportunistic exes, friends who let us down, feeling misunderstood or maligned. And yet these experiences unite us. These are the timeless stories we share through music, literature, poetry and dance. The universality of the album is meant to excite the imagination, as Dejey describes.
“In my opinion, [the album is] very much about finding inner power, so I think that translates sonically in a lot of ways…” she says. “If you were to visualise this collection of songs, I’d say to picture blood red, broken plates, scorpions, sharp shadows on your walls, misty sunsets and maybe strobe lights too.”
Opening track “Headache” is a seductive, piano-and-bass R&B ballad. Dejey’s voice is confident, melodious and multi-tonal. She sounds like fellow London-born Martina Topley-Bird sometimes, and the production – muddy bass, gothic atmospherics, and slippery, throaty interludes – is comparable to Billy Eilish. That mood takes a brighter turn on “Just Because You Said You’re Sorry Doesn’t Mean You Are,” a deceptively upbeat pop number that addresses that slimy ex who suggests meeting up when he’s lonely.
“Why The?” takes a haunting, minor key melody and adds industrial, gritty sampled noise as Dejey tries to untangle whether she is to blame for a toxic relationship: “I know this feeling would last for a while/But I can’t wriggle out the chains/And then they’ll say that it’s all in my mind.”
This writer’s personal favourite track, the glorious synth drama of “Like A Curse” is immediately compelling. If Dejey is truly losing her mind, as she confesses, then it sounds wonderful. Layered vocal harmonies build to a one-woman choir. It’s a gorgeous way to kick off a song, and it suggests there’s multiple personalities, multiple women all in one body, one song. Perhaps, more than any of the other songs, this is the one that most speaks to Kali Ma’s scimitar, sword and trident-bearing vengeful goddess. “You made me feel so small, you know,” Dejey croons, sounding totally broken. “Do you know how we’d go, do you know how far?” comes the snaking, sweeping harmony in response, and that juxtaposition between broken girl and furious woman is redolent of Kali Ma’s nurturing, maternal spirit co-existing with her brutal, raging elements.
Outro track “Yours” brings a benevolent end to the album. It is melancholy and sweetly captivating. Gently understated piano chords float into the ether, a sleepy trap beat keeps time, and Dejey’s multi-layered harmonies build into a blaze of synth-samples and the sound of a cassette tape being chewed up.
“All the songs were written during the first lockdown starting in March 2020 and they were pretty quick to write, except for ‘Yours,’” says Dejey. “That song was the hardest to finish because, for a while, it just didn’t have an ending. I was listening to Bring Me The Horizon’s new album at the time and was completely blown away by their energy so I sent the unfinished version of ‘Yours’ to my friend Matt Brettle and was like, ‘We need to create some kind of BMTH drum pattern,’ and he absolutely killed it. We went back and forth with tweaks for a while but that song has such a sonic journey. It’s definitely the most proud I’ve ever been of a song so far.”
Arrangement usually comes first for Dejey, setting the melody and the mood as a foundation to build upon. “I tend to have a vocal melody down and then I’ll sing gibberish until I find a rhythm I like, then the lyrics come naturally,” she says. “I find it crazy how unintentional I am with lyrics, but I always end up writing exactly how I feel at the time. Maybe it’s the lack of pressure – my subconscious just brings up exactly what I need to say.”
Dejey has got a DIY set-up in her room, where she records everything. The vocals on the EP were recorded as first takes, intended for demo use, but Dejey liked them so much she maintained them as they were.
“I just ended up loving the energy they had,” she explains. “It’s hard to recreate that energy the same way again, so I just left them in. I love that, because I can literally hear myself writing the song as I listen back. Each song varied with how long it took. Sometimes you think you’ve got a solid idea down in a day, then you listen again and hear a totally different way it could go. Using Splice for finding samples quickly is really helpful for staying in the flow of writing which massively helps my productivity for sure. I’d recommend it to anyone wanting to start out with production.”
Having whet our appetites with this gothic, hooky pop, Dejey assures us there’s plenty more on the horizon. “I’m currently working on some new ideas, which I’m really excited about,” she says. “I’m also planning a gig or two, which would be my first show in like, three years? Playing music live? Wild!”
“I have never felt true to my age, and every time someone asks me how old I am, it’s like I’m lying,” says Billie Marten, certainly the epitome of an old soul if ever there was one. Not yet 22, the British singer-songwriter spent her mid-to-late teens releasing delicately rendered folk music across two albums and two EPs; though her work has always exhibited a precocious composure, her latest, Flora Fauna, out May 21 on IMPERIAL Music/Fiction Records, sees her shed the diaphanous layers, materializing into something fuller and more earthy. It’s a confident step away from the ethereal and into the reality of adulthood; on Flora Fauna, Marten feels less like a wispy daydream and more like a woman waking up at the end of the world.
“I think I thought I was very much an adult on the first and second albums, but I was so confused and so impressionable and was trying to put across this very, like, English lit, bucolic sense of personality, which is a section of my personality, but I’ve now realized that it’s not the entirety. That’s why all the artwork this time around is kind of confrontational and I’m literally eating mud to kind of get rid of that whimsical waif idea,” she explains. “I didn’t wanna be this kind of floaty ethereal waif anymore. I got rid of that person.”
Signing with Chess Club and releasing her debut Writing of Blues and Yellows when she was just sixteen, the boutique label no longer felt like “home” by the time they were absorbed by parent RCA/Sony (they’ve since become independent again). Though she went on to release sophomore effort Feeding Seahorses by Hand via the major, she amicably severed ties with her entire team apart from longtime producer Rich Cooper by the time she’d begun writing Flora Fauna at the end of 2019. “I just called him up and we started making sounds together again. And it was so quick and easy and natural to me and none of it was trying to force this particular image or writing style out – it was very immediate for me,” Marten recalls. She took up playing bass, which she says was a “huge moment” musically. “It just made all of these sounds come out louder and broader and more immediate.”
Marten had already been listening to a lot of Fiona Apple as she began recording Flora Fauna at the start of 2020. Apple dropped surprise opus Fetch the Bolt Cutters just as the pandemic put a temporary halt on that process, and while it was more stripped back and jazzy than the previous albums Marten had gravitated toward, it was an important reminder that Marten stick to her own vision. “We just began layering live sounds and re-amping everything and making sure everything had a huge backbone and was massive, essentially, in your ears,” she says. “I wanted that bass tone to be so juicy. I didn’t want any thinness.” Rather than rely on the quirks of incorporating organic sounds as she had on previous records, she wanted Flora Fauna to “feel a lot more live and present.”
That extended to the album’s themes as much as the instrumentation. The springy bassline of album opener “Garden of Eden” snaps around lines like “I’ve been growing leaf by leaf/Dying for the world to see” before bursting into a twinkling chorus. Metaphors meld the natural world with Marten’s personal and musical growth over the course of the record, making statements both direct and roundabout about humanity’s place on this earth.
Sometimes, that’s intensely personal – more than a few of these songs see Marten coming to terms with her human shell. While previous albums were abstract about her experiences with depression, Marten retains the poeticism while offering very literal insights into cultivating “a good healthy relationship with the one person that matters most” – herself. “Growing up I felt very alien to my body. I developed an eating disorder when I was like 13, 14, and I’m still battling with that now, but the past two albums I was not ready to admit that or address that at all,” she admits. “This album takes into account all those hypocrisies and the changing of minds that you have each day; whether you feel positive or negative about yourself fluctuates daily and I wanted to address that in every song.”
On “Heaven” she’s looking for salvation or relief, trilling the mantra “give my body patience to be free” over exotic guitar tones and fuzzy synth. Soaring strings lend conviction to Marten’s boundary-setting assertion on “Kill the Clown:” “After all I am not a baby doll/I’ve got bills to pay and they never go away… I see everything in color/And I’m done with that.” On the plucky, self-deprecating “Ruin,” she acknowledges she’s not always friends with herself, stretching her airy falsetto over an elastic alt-pop chorus.
“Something happens when you go through puberty and you develop more and become this womanly shape which is supposed to get you ready for making babies and being strong and traveling and whatever. When you just so don’t want that to happen, you just go into yourself and your posture gets really bad, and you’re trying to be this skeletal image of yourself, which is not accurate,” Marten says. But on album album stand-out “Liquid Love,” she does achieve some kind of balance, even if its only a self-soothing sentiment she aspires to – it’s a breezy, easy-going love letter to what her body is capable of in a sensual self-appreciation slow jam.
“That was one of the quickest songs that came out, cause it’s kind of this repetitive nursery rhyme chant thing I have going,” she says, referring to a repeating line: “all our actions are reactions.” She built chords around a sweetly hummed vocal looped with Cooper’s Yamaha sampling keyboard, added a lazy little bassline “just doing its own thing,” and paired a drum machine with a live kit for a nice mix of digital and organic percussion. “It’s an incredibly immersive pool of a song and it sort of opens you up into this world that isn’t really familiar, but it’s kind of comforting,” Marten says. “There’s no chord changes, no key changes, it just is what it is. I wanted to layer vocals and be my own choir… and then I wanted the main vocal melody to just be an ascending mantra.”
At its heart, the song is about creating a space to protect and cultivate her well-being. “I just wasn’t doing that and I wasn’t hanging around with good people that made me feel good and that’s sort of the first step I think. If you reflect good things they come back to you, and I was reflecting some bad, bad stuff throughout the past year and a half, two years. People have noticed that I’m smiling now, and that never happened. I can kind of carry myself a bit more,” she says. “It’s a big learning curve, for sure. But I’m definitely getting there.”
Marten isn’t wholly preoccupied with herself, but also her place in a world dangling at the precipice of an environmental apocalypse. Her focus on nature as a grounding force is evident enough from the title of the record, and while there’s a subtle vein of confrontation railing against prior generations’ disastrous stewardship of our shared planet, Marten sees climate change as a systemic issue rather than a wholly individual responsibility. “For me it’s about respecting the earth a bit more, and that could be completely impractically – it could be just thinking about it fondly, or making sure you’re walking every day or buying a new plant that makes you feel good,” she says. “Concepts like nature are so abstract and evocative and it can be anything you want it to be, versus very specific problems like self love and self hate and relationships. Knowing that something is that huge puts everything into perspective for me.”
Still, there are times when something as innocuously tragic as a one-legged pigeon sends her reeling into a “long boring old man rant about modern life,” as she does on “Pigeon.” “I’m a very sporadic writer – I’m not good at daily writing. I can only write at the point where something needs to come out of me right now, and it needs to be honest,” Marten says. “I was picking up all these worldly anxieties… just stuff you can’t control at all, things that will happen with or without you. To the point where I’m sitting down and writing, that’s usually just have had it.”
The album ends with a haunting push-and-pull; “Walnut” sees Marten opining the forbidden fruits of love from a nut too hard to crack, while “Aquarium” admits her reliance on friends and lovers alike (“I am too bold without them/I am too cold without them… Couldn’t count on any others,” she sings).
“I wanted to keep up with that cyclical theme – I liked the fact that [Flora Fauna] opens with ‘Garden of Eden’ and you’re set up on appreciation and positivity and growing and goodness, and then in ‘Walnut,’ I wanted to express the forbidden nature of love and nature itself and happiness and how you’re just always climbing through this cave or maze, and it’s more of a struggle than you realize,” Marten says. “Aquarium,” she adds, is a portrait of herself at her lowest points. “Excuse me while I lay here in the shade,” she pleads, retreating into said garden.
The religious allusions throughout the album are more of a Leonard Cohen-esque device for exploring mortality, Marten says, than an indicator of her own beliefs; her father is a “strong atheist,” and although she grew up going to church with her religious mum, “I was mostly just observing; that’s one of my favorite hobbies. I just love looking at other people’s lives and being very quiet,” she says. “But religion is often talked about within song because quite often you’re trying to describe something that is unattainable. It’s a good way to connect the abstract with immediate things.”
Marten has always been skilled at tapping into resonant imagery, but if anything, Flora Fauna feels like the truest rendering of her personhood to date. “I wanted to face things head on, and lyrically speaking, I got much less abstract and just said how I felt, and it felt amazing,” she says. “I didn’t have to carry the pretense of being an artist – and now I separate the two, you know? I’m not who I am writing songs and on stage, that’s not my entirety. I’m a completely different person when I’m not making music and that’s something to accept.”
Getting rejected isn’t fun for anyone. Being the rejecter, though, isn’t exactly pleasant either. Most of us have been in that awkward situation where someone liked us and we didn’t like them back. On her latest single “Empty Calls,” London-based pop artist Zelha reflects on the difficult process of having to reject somebody.
“It’s a really awkward situation where you don’t really know what to do with it,” she says. “When I was writing this song, I was kind of going through that, and I think it helped me approach the situation and hopefully can help other people as well. It’s quite a common thing to go through.”
“I can’t keep it up, I can’t keep it in/I’ve been avoiding, just keep avoiding you/I can’t let you in/let you under my skin/I’ll just keep running,” her clear, hypnotizing voice sings in the catchy pre-chorus against energetic percussion that evokes this very sense of running away from drama only to have it bite you in the back.
The video features Zelha dancing in the street, on the beach, and in a parking lot as she takes the viewer through her emotional process. “The idea was to recreate that feeling of wanting to escape, so the scenes at the beach were by myself; it was really a way to show the reflection that happens in that situation and wanting to be away with your thoughts,” she says.
In her case, she ended up telling the other person everything she was feeling (and wasn’t). “Honesty is always the best policy; if you don’t know where you stand, then it’s just worse,” she says. “I hope that people can relate to it and that it shows them that some things have to be said even if it’s awkward and it’s not easy. In the long run, it’ll be better.”
She wanted the single to sound like a pop song but to also incorporate indie elements; she and producer Jack Gourlay used lots of tom samples to create an organic sound and incorporated multiple layers of synths to evoke an ethereal, nostalgic feel.
The single appears on Zelha’s upcoming debut EP, which she says deals in various ways with self-discovery, dysfunctional relationships, and mental health. One song, “Stage Lights,” for instance, is about the self-consciousness that comes from thinking other people are watching you when they’re really more focused on themselves.
The EP also includes her first single, “Player 1,” a chill, harmony-filled, Lana Del Rey-like track about “someone who wants to control everyone and everything,” she says. “I think especially women tend to have those experiences quite a lot, having someone gaslight you or manipulate you without realizing it.”
She and Gourlay started producing the EP two years ago and plan to release it later this year. All the instrumentation was done digitally, with the exception of some guitar parts.
Zelha, whose real name is Caroline Marcela Zandona, is half-Mexican and half-Belgian and was raised in Belgium. “I grew up with both types of music: French on one side and Mexican on the other,” she says. “I don’t know if it can be directly heard in my music, but the way I write lyrics may be a bit different because English isn’t my first language.” She chose her stage name because she wanted something that worked phonetically in French, Spanish, and English, incorporating elements of her middle and last name.
As a student at the Institute of Contemporary Music Performance in London, Zelha is currently writing a dissertation on fourth-wave feminism, female artists, and how they’re represented in their lyrics. She’s already started making music for her second EP, which explores the feminist themes she’s studying, and hopes to produce it using an all-female and nonbinary team. “There’s a lot of barriers to women [in the music industry], and I think we should all be helping each other out. By talking about it, it’s just going to become a more common subject, not as taboo,” she says. “Pushing female producers and female co-writers is what we should be doing.”
A little while back, Dublin-based singer-songwriter Anna B Savage kept coming across the corncrake — a bird that is easy to hear but often difficult to spot — in books she was reading. This species was a convenient symbol for a relationship she had at the time, which lacked the feelings of passion and romance she’d had with previous partners.
“It just appeared twice in a short space of time, not having known what it was, it being this thing you can hear but can’t certainly see, and it’s noticeable but not overwhelming or overbearing,” she explains. “When I was much younger, when I’d feel something for someone, I’d be ravenous to hang out around them all the time and wouldn’t be able to control myself in their presence. But with him, it felt calm, and because of that calmness, I was like, ‘Am I actually feeling proper sexy feelings, or do I just kind of love him?’ So that’s what that’s about, and the evolution of the way you feel things toward people when you get a little bit older.”
“I don’t know if this is even real/I don’t feel things as keenly as I used to,” she sings in a theatrical, operatic voice against acoustic guitar, deep, warm humming, and harmonies created using vocal doubling.
She and Producer William Doyle (East India Youth) provided all the vocals on the song themselves. “Will set up a microphone in the middle of the room, and we sang whatever harmonies popped into our heads and did that for the entire track,” she remembers.
The video for the single appropriately features birds, and you can hear the squawking of a corncrake in the beginning.
The symbolism of birds features prominently on her debut album, A Common Turn, which comes out January 29 via City Slang. The dark titular track, for instance, employs the highly migratory common tern as a symbol as Savage recounts conversations with a partner that led her to realize she needed to leave.
The video for “A Common Tern” references the work of performance artist Vito Acconci, who is known for doing disconcerting things like throwing soapy water in his eyes and trying to catch tennis balls while blindfolded. She reenacted the latter act, wearing white as black-painted tennis balls splattered her with paint, representing the disintegration of her personality in the relationship.
Savage’s sophisticated, high-brow music creates an interesting contrast with some of her lyrical content, particularly in her first single off the upcoming album, “Chelsea Hotel #3.” Inspired by Leonard Cohen’s “Chelsea Hotel #2,” she starts off recounting being unable to focus while receiving oral sex and segues into her larger sexual journey, candidly singing about not orgasming until she was 18 because she’d learned it was all about PIV and didn’t masturbate. At the end, she arrives at a New Year’s resolution: “I will learn to take care of myself.”
“I’d always kind of relied on other people, and I never really thought I was allowed to masturbate — it hadn’t even crossed my mind that I could be autonomous about my own sexual desires or capacity, and I think it’s important to hear women talk about sexual stuff,” she says.
The rest of the album deals in various ways with self-esteem, sense of belonging, and “a sense of trying to understand yourself and having to wade through all the shit you get taught and find out who you actually are,” she says.
Savage’s music is difficult to classify genre-wise; it incorporates elements of rock, jazz, and even classical music. Lyrically, her intellect and thoughtfulness are evident throughout her work; her songs read like analyses of past experiences or conversational musings on common topics of discussion. In “I,” off her first EP, for instance, she sings, “I would say that I’m a feminist/But there’s something key that I have missed/Cause I want to be strong and I’d like to be fine/And I hate that it’s fueled/Even in part by my own mind.”
Both of Savage’s parents are opera singers, so she spent much of her childhood backstage. “Singing always felt like the most natural thing to me,” she says. She learned guitar at age 13 and has been making her own music since, accompanying herself on guitar and piano. Recently, she moved from London to Dublin to get a master’s degree in music.
Her other current project is making a movie with her ex-boyfriend and first love Jem Talbot, also the director of her “A Common Tern” video, about their relationship. After not speaking for seven or eight years, she had a dream about him and checked up on him, then they met up and started talking about the project. The film became a chance for them to examine their relationship, including intimate aspects like losing their virginities together; they even interviewed a mutual friend to get an objective version of the story after realizing each of them had different memories of the relationship.
Savage grew inspired to make candid art about sexuality after reading the book I Love Dick by Chris Kraus, which documents the author’s obsession with a man she meets at a party; she sends him hundreds of letters until he takes her to court, and she reassures him that the letters don’t really have anything to do with him.
The book introduced Savage to “the concept of being allowed to write about whatever the fuck I wanted, and it didn’t matter who I was writing about,” she explains. “Women have always been muses, and men are used to them always being muses, and it doesn’t have to do with any of them. I feel like it gave me a permission slip to write about whatever the fuck I wanted to.”
A lot of us are going through a rough time right now, to put it mildly, and UK-based pop artist Ciara Vizzard can relate. Several years ago, she lost two family members over the course of a week, and a few months later, someone set her car on fire. “I felt so attacked,” she remembers.
Needing a positive attitude adjustment, she wrote “Victory,” a song about triumphing over challenges, to give herself a mental boost. “I wrote this song to say, ‘You can try to bring me down, but I’m still going to get up and still going to have a victory,'” she says. “The song is me talking to the devil and basically saying, ‘F off.'”
Sadly, declaring victory was premature – soon after the song was written, Vizzard’s grandmother, who she was living with, died, and the singer was in an accident that required four surgeries on her leg. By the time the fourth procedure had been completed, quarantine had started, so Vizzard remained sidelined, essentially unable to leave her home. But the message within “Victory” remained, and at this point, it wasn’t just Vizzard who needed to hear it. Today, its release offers some very needed encouragement as much of the world re-enters quarantine.
“I feel like more people can now relate to that feeling of being totally knocked around and working really hard to be getting back up and be like, ‘I’m not gonna be defeated by this year,'” she says. “I guess it’s my fight song. When I listen to it now, I still relate to the lyrics. I still feel the emotion just as much as I felt when I first wrote it.”
“I thought I was breaking on down/But I’m standing my ground/I won’t forget how this feels/Remember that it’s real,” her gentle, comforting voice sings and then repeats in dreamy echoes against poppy guitar riffs and percussion meant to evoke the sound of a marching band, perpetually pushing onward in the spirit of the song. She played the guitar herself, plucking rather than strumming, and producer Nosa Apollo (Craig David, Ella Mai, Mabel) added an ethereal quality to the sound.
Vizzard created a feeling of perseverance in the song by singing in a lower register in the verses and a falsetto voice in the chorus. “I feel like the way the song has been sung, it holds that balance between vulnerability and feeling broken, but also, I’m gonna keep singing because I’m not gonna give up,” she says. “I think that’s what I’m really proud of in this song — the way the song is melodically, it’s a mirror of what’s being spoken about in the lyrics.”
She initially came into the studio with a different version of the song, then quickly decided to scrap it and re-wrote most of it on the spot. “Some songs just write themselves,” she says. “This was one of those songs.”
Vizzard was born in the U.S. to an Irish mother and American father and moved to France at age 12, where she started playing the guitar. Now based outside London in Reading, she studied medicine and went on to become a doctor with the goal of becoming a full-time musician once she paid off her debt. She released her first EP, Fearless, in 2017 and has released four more singles (including “Victory”) since, while continuing to work in a rehab ward at a hospital.
Her latest singles all have a similar theme of conquering hardship and compassion for those going through it, including oneself. Last year’s “Hurricane” is about feeling alone and wanting support from others after her accident, “Is It Okay” is about struggling to move on after romantic heartache, and “Price” is about “recognizing that you don’t know what everyone’s going through and you can’t judge someone based on how they present themselves,” she says.
“‘Victory’ is another aspect of that same thing — you never know what someone’s going through,” she explains. “All of them are about going through something and recognizing how important it is for us as human beings to show each other love and compassion, and that’s how we get through it together.”
Perhaps that’s one of the greatest lessons COVID has taught us — “you have to help each other out,” as Vizzard puts it. “Something I’ve learned is people come at you with their emotions because they’re scared, because they’re hurting, and it’s really easy to become defensive with that. But actually, something else is driving that, and it’s important to recognize that someone’s going through something. It’s jut a matter of showing love and compassion toward each other.”
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Listening to MEDIUMN, the debut EP by UK trio GRAMN., it’s hard to imagine a time when 27 year-old vocalist Evan Williams, who goes by Aux, didn’t think of herself as a singer. After auditioning for the British Academy of New Music on a whim, she began working with soul duo Equals as an “honorary member” – but that, too, proved serendipitous, as Equals producer James Low tapped her to provide vocals for the grimy, heavy beats he’d been making on the side. He also brought multi-instrumentalist Johnny Tomlinson into the project, and the trio began creating an experimental, electro-infused alternative R&B tracks, quickly realising that the music was simply too good to leave in the studio. Dubbing their project GRAMN (pronounced like “damn”), they released their first singles, “Write it Down” and “Freak Out,” in 2019.
While the foot-tapping “Write it Down” was a fitting introduction to showcase Aux’s vocal range, the running thread in “Freak Out” is a funk-inspired guitar riff that ties the whole track together as more elements weave in and out of the chords. But the release of “Mini Milk” in July, at a time when the world was seeing protests against police brutality and conversations around white fragility had been renewed, proved to be the band’s biggest statement to date. Named for the mini milk ice cream lolly, a popular summer treat in the UK, the song takes to task so-called white allies whose performative wokeness felt tiring to Aux – through the vector of an alt-R&B bop.
“A mini milk is someone who is frozen by guilt,” Aux explains. “My issue is with the dismissiveness of it all – when people say ‘Well you know, I didn’t shoot you’ or ‘It wasn’t me.’ ‘Mini Milk’ is basically like ‘stop chatting shit’ unless you want to have an educated and intelligent conversation about how we’re going to solve this problem. Stop being guilty… no one is accusing you of anything… if you feel that way then that’s a you problem.” Noting the scenario of people posting a black square on Instagram for #BlackOutTuesday being an example of limited, meaningless “support,” Aux uses “Mini Milk” to highlight similar contradictions she’s seen within the Black Lives Matter movement, repeating the phrase “ain’t enough” throughout the track. “It’s crazy that we have to split hairs between non-racist and anti-racist at this point because otherwise people just don’t get it,” she says.
Like Reni Eddo-Lodge’s landmark text Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, “Mini Milk” captures a particular frustration that exists on top of more overt forms of racism that still persist in the UK, like other nations with colonial roots. There’s a growing perception that the racism in the British Isles is to a lesser degree than what people see in the United States; other than being false, this creates a dangerous precedent in which those in power allow systematic racism to fester rather than working to eradicate it. “We’re 4% of the population but we still have the highest incarceration rate. Black women are five times more likely to die during childbirth. You are 40 times more likely to be stopped by the police as a black man,” Aux points out. She urges would-be allies to educate themselves on the real issues before making empty gestures; a song like “Mini Milk” is a perfect catalyst to snap people out of complacency.
Though “Mini Milk” feels especially relevant in this moment, all of the songs on MEDIUMN accomplish this to some degree, bursting with infectious production that makes heavier subject matter more palatable. The EP compiles the group’s previous singles alongside relaxed and atmospheric album opener “Howl,” the dreamlike “Coaster Boy,” and EP closer “Better Places,” a dark, soulful track that communicates the pain of domestic violence against the backdrop of an ethereal soundscape. The collection of work serves as confirmation of the trio’s undeniable talent, one that will only continue to evolve. It’s also a sonic exploration of Aux’s quarter-life experience; the EP’s namesake describes the balancing act she’s had to do as a biracial woman with a history of trauma. “I’ve had a strange existence; some of it’s been great and some of it has not. I think the only way I function is either really really happy or really really sad, so I have to find this semi-apathetic medium,” she explains. “I think maybe it started as a survival instinct – I just became medium.”
Though it began as Low’s side project, GRAMN. is now entirely collaborative – and they have more music on the way later this year. “Sometimes things happen so organically and a song forms like a baby. But then sometimes you’re mining for the rarest stone!” Aux says of the trio’s songwriting process. “It’s like Jenga trying to pull songs out of your brain – sometimes you can just find it and sometimes you cannot, and sometimes you pull them out and you’re like, ‘Just go back in there!’” But with a critical eye and clever wordplay, Aux reveals just how much she cares about the message she and GRAMN. bring to their audience.
London-based musician Raphaella is what you might describe as a triple threat. Working in the music industry as a producer, writer and singer, the 29-year-old has collated an impressive back catalog of work, which includes collaborations with Rudimental, and most recently, Little Mix. On her latest EP Real, Raphaella draws on her first-hand experiences with heartbreak, finding inspiration in that tumultuous and very familiar feeling of loss of identity.
“I wrote Real because my heart needed to,” Raphaella tells Audiofemme. Released in May, the artist described the EP’s creation as a natural process, culminating from an eight-month period of writing. Yet it wasn’t until she looked back retrospectively that she realized Real functions as a detailed account of moving on after heartbreak and the stages that follow. “I always use songwriting as a form of therapy and I often write songs as I’m actually feeling that emotion,” she says. “I was badly bullied at school so when I was about 13 I turned to songwriting as a way to express how I was feeling. The Real EP just happened sort of naturally.”
The track order of the EP is demonstrative of its organic inception, though Raphaella didn’t set out to create a collection of music in such a chronological fashion. “I think in a really cool way, the order in which I’d written the songs turned out to be the most honest representation of the story,” she explains. “Instead of being led by tempos and genres when organizing the track listing, I kept them in the order of how they were written so when you listen to it, it’s sort of like therapy.”
Whether we are searching for love or trying to move on from it, the imperceptible, abstract feelings it dredges up can have an extraordinary effect on our consciousness. With this in mind, Raphaella sought to investigate those connections – not only from her own perspective, but also within the symbiotic relationship of singer and audience, offering some respite in return. “As I write I unpack, work through, understand and come to terms with how I’m feeling, and when I finish writing, it’s a relief because it feels like I’ve finally got off my chest what I needed to,” she says. “My songwriter friends and I often joke we’re in constant therapy because every time we go to a session you literally have to open up to someone you just met a minute ago.”
Driven by her complicated emotions, she gave form and body to complex feelings by experimenting with a multitude of sounds that comprise the EP. “That was the exciting thing,” she recalls. “I knew I wanted to find different soundscapes, different sound palettes and synths that I hadn’t used before.”
The EP starts with the atmospheric and somber “Closure,” featuring Amsterdam-based alt R&B musician Nambyar. The two sing despondent lyrics, echoed in unison throughout the track to amp up a feeling of uncertainty. “I kept it almost entirely empty of full drums until the very end,” Raphaella says of the sparse, moody opener. “I really loved the feeling of suspense the whole way through so I wanted to keep that going – playing with synth LFOs and automation to create the rise and falls. I loved the space created.”
Following “Closure,” “Alright” takes a sassier turn, entering a new stage in the process of returning to who she was before the break-up. “When I wrote ‘Alright’ I was really annoyed! I’d just been let down by someone I thought loved me, so I started free-styling around with melodies with that emotion in my head and heart,” Raphaella says. In the song, she makes a point to say that she’s over it, or at least will be soon.
These tracks communicate the physical and spiritual listlessness that occurs in a relationship’s aftermath. “When you’re in a relationship for a long period of time you adapt your identity,” she points out. “You make sacrifices and concessions, which is part of being in a partnership, but sometimes that goes too far one way or another and you start to lose yourself.” The EP’s power lies in how Raphaella responds to that all consuming feeling by tackling it head on; as producer, Raphaella deliberately chose heavier sounds for the final two tracks, as if to metaphorically tether the listener back to reality.
With penultimate title track “Real,” Raphaella reflects on previously forgotten strengths that she still possesses, and in turn reminds listeners of the greatness they too harbor within. “My My,” a substantially more upbeat track continues this theme with an added element of newfound optimism, documenting her feelings of renewal and willingness to give love another chance. “My main production choices were keeping these two very ‘drop’ or ‘chorus’ focused,” she says, leaving listeners on a triumphant note as she readies herself to jump love’s hurdles again.
Heartbreak is not something we can ever prepare for, but as the singer-songwriter puts it, that doesn’t mean we should shy away. “I don’t think we can prepare for anything major that life throws us but that’s sort of the beauty of it,” she says. “You never grow from only experiencing things that you can control.”
As much as it signifies romantic rebirth, Real highlights a new era for Raphaella as a songwriter – and perhaps, even moreso, as a producer. With each track she’s ventured further and expanded her expertise by incorporating new sounds that encapsulate the very visceral emotions she, and many of us, have felt. And she’ll never let heartbreak hold her back. “I write nearly every single day – not just for myself but for others too,” she pledges. “I’m always just looking for something that feels new.”
“Every day’s the same when you’re locked up in a cage/There’s nothing here to do and my wings just feel like glue,” sings London-based indie pop band Ruby Hive in their second single “The Bird Song.” Surprisingly, the song was written long before the coronavirus quarantine and was meant “to introduce [the band’s] political beliefs, touching upon animal captivity and the lack of sympathy for other people’s situation generally,” says band leader Frida Mattsson. But without knowing it, Ruby Hive created a song that feels pertinent to those still in isolation – and as protests have broken out across the US and around the world in the name of racial justice, its message of understanding resonates, too.
“We started writing this song long ago, but perhaps we did not realize the power and truth it carried,” says Mattsson. Though the guitar and percussion give it a poppy vibe, and Mattsson’s background in musical theater evident in the song’s cheerful harmonies, Ruby Hive hopes to remind listeners that millions of people are suffering from the same anxiety, tension, and restlessness. “We hope that it reinforces a sense of community,” Mattsson explains. “It shows that the image of the individual who does not need others is false, and that the bonds we create in times of crisis are in fact stronger than ever.”
The song expresses “the importance of being able to put yourselves in different shoes, whether that is in the shoes of another human, animal, or plant” says Mattsson — an especially relevant reminder as protests continue. She hopes “The Bird Song” will “give comfort, hope, and unite us in these scary days,” she says. “Stay open and willing to learn, and remember if a conversation is hard, it’s probably the one worth having.”
Ruby Hive has a habit of playing with unusual viewpoints. While “The Bird Song” takes the perspective of a bird in a cage, the band’s previous single, the jazzy “You Mix,” takes another unconventional point of view: that of a painting.
“‘You Mix’ is a love story between the artwork and the artist from the artwork’s perspective,” Mattsson explains. “Although it has a different feel than ‘The Bird Song,’ it still keeps with the same values, where playfulness is present. Ruby Hive build a lot upon ‘what if?’ How would it feel to be a canvas falling in love with its artist? Or how would it feel to be a little bird in a cage dreaming to spread its wings and fly away? Our tales come in shapes of common, relatable, sometimes even boring themes, but we always have a twist or two up our sleeves.”
Ruby Hive, whose influences range from Regina Spektor to Sammy Rae and the Friends, has been sharing snippets of works in progress on Instagram. The music’s carefree mood aims to provide an alternative to the “sad, moody tunes about love” and “the world’s impending doom” that Mattsson sees in the indie scene. She also hopes it helps preserve the inner children she believes reside in all. “Adulthood should not make people crack because of the stiff life they are living,” she says. “We should not lose the joy of the little things we can find in our everyday life, because we are always able to look at it from a new angle… We hope to keep encouraging people to care about your neighbor, your neighbor’s cat, and the tree the cat climbs.”
Isabella Steinsdotter, known simply as Steinsdotter professionally, is best known as a visual artist. However, she recently debuted her first single, “Hidden Child,” a song about reclaiming your body in the aftermath of a sexual assault. The music and its accompanying video (directed by Fayann Smith) are equal parts gorgeous and haunting, featuring Steinsdotter singing eerie lyrics like “seduction lies in cold disguise” in a soprano voice as she walks down the street in a lacy white dress and then shaves off all her hair on a beach. Hailing from Norway and currently living in London, Steinsdotter is a descendent of a viking witch warrior whose jewelry resides in the British Museum, and this ancestry influences much of her work. We talked to Steinsdotter about her music and artwork, its incorporation of witchcraft, and her efforts to empower sexual assault survivors.
AF: What was the thought process behind your debut single “Hidden Child”?
IS: “Hidden Child” is to me a song about the loss of innocence. You’re in a dark place and you see nothing, and you try to create that hope for yourself. It’s a song about creating hope where there is no hope. There’s a certain darkness to it because it’s very real, so it’s not just the nice things you want to remember but the real things.
AF: What made you want to write about this topic?
IS: It’s a very personal song because it’s a song about surviving sexual assault at the end of the day. It wasn’t like I planned that would be the first song I released, but at the same time, when it was finished, it seemed like a very natural way for me to be introduced to music because it says a lot about who I am. I guess I wanted to release something that was real, and I feel like it is very real. I’ve had a lot of people reach out to me who have been in similar situations who have also had sexual assault, and it’s been very empowering to have all those people share their stories and be empowered by it.
AF: What message would you like to send to sexual assault survivors with the song?
IS: Basically that you’re not alone; that regardless of how overwhelming and challenging it is, if you are in that situation, there are ways that you can take back your own power. You don’t have to stay in that state of being. It’s very overwhelming when it happens, and I think the good thing about it is, the awareness about it is becoming greater. We talk a lot about it nowadays. It’s not so easy to get away with, and I feel like it’s a time for people to come together and tell the truth about it. I’ve seen even men who have done bad things to women are almost brave enough to say it out loud now because it’s so obvious that it’s wrong. It’s not really a simple message, it’s not one thing, but it’s openness and awareness – basically, showing that it needs to change and that we need to change consciousness around it more. I just don’t want women to have to feel unsafe because that is the worst feeling, and it’s nice to find something powerful in it somehow that you can take for yourself. That’s kind of what I was trying to do for myself by writing it, finding something powerful, not just something broken.
AF: What is the significance of you shaving your head in the video?
IS: It was so powerful for me personally. It was very tense because when we filmed the video, everything happened in real time. Nothing was staged. It was all about letting go of the projections that people put onto me — not just me, but as a woman, you constantly have to battle all these projections people put onto you, and you’re an object of many things, and it’s not necessarily like you want to be that. So, for me, it was about stripping everything back, getting it all off me, then starting fresh with just me. The symbolism was to get rid of all the extra things, back to the organic self.
AF: I read that you’re a descendent of a viking witch. Do you identify as a witch?
IS: Yeah, I definitely identify as a witch, and ever since I found out, it’s been extremely empowering for me personally. I know a lot of really amazing witches. It seems like it’s one of those things that is also becoming okay — it’s not something that you necessarily cannot talk about, and I just see that everything’s changing into a more open discussion, and I really like that.
AF: What does being a witch mean to you?
IS: To me, it just means being organic and in touch with our own emotions and nature in a way that is nurturing for you and people around you. It doesn’t necessarily have to be more complicated than that. I feel really humble to nature, and in some ways, that is the most important relationship to worship as a witch because nature can lead me to where I should be.
AF: How does witchcraft affect your work?
IS: In my process of writing or even singing or rehearsing, I will go outside, walk around barefoot, or sing in the woods to get centered when I’m really nervous, because I get really nervous if I have a show or something. I have to work really hard to stay grounded.
AF: I was reading about your photography, video, and performance project Seiðr, which is described as a “ritual inspired by the female vikings.” How does that incorporate your witch ancestry?
IS: Seiðr is a name for spirituality that the vikings would use. We went to Norway, and we were out in minus 12 to 18 degrees, and we found this presence where we just lit a fire and wanted to humbly give our thanks to our ancestors and to nature. Because we were hunting for the northern lights, we were dancing around the fire, and everything is intensely about visualization rather than straightforward words. Let’s say, for example, for me, a ritual can be singing and the energy you’re putting into that song. Seiðr is about working with the organic ways of nature, but being very present in that place and following your intuitive mind rather than your rational mind. That’s the state of mind you want to be in so you can communicate with something greater than a singular person. It was very refreshing. Have you ever been in minus 18 degrees? Your brain just kind of freezes, and you can’t feel that you’re cold because you can’t feel that you’re there anyway, and your phone dies quickly because it’s so cold — it just sucks the battery out of it. It’s really strange.
AF: Are you working on any new music?
IS: I am. I’m basically working to release my next song, which will be released in early November, so that’s what I’m doing at the moment. I’m also working on finishing the music for the video for Seiðr, which is going to be in a museum in Rome for a month. I have the music. I’m making music for it, so that’s very exciting.
AF: What kind of music?
IS: This one is a little different from the way I normally do it because I’ve been walking around collecting sounds in nature and stuff. I love atmospheric music in general and kind of classical, but it will be not a straightforward singy-song but more atmospheric. I’ve been very influenced by Seiðr itself and the viking-sounding music. I really like what’s coming out of Scandinavia.
AF: That’s so cool. Is there anything else you wanted to mention?
IS: It is quite funny that in the “Hidden Child” music video, the dress I’m wearing is also actually made out of the curtains that came from Buckingham Palace, so basically, they’re the queen’s curtains on the dress. So it’s even more symbolic, ripping it open. The symbolism of ripping that dress is even stronger because of where it came from.
AF: What does that represent to you?
IS: An old world that is not very functional anymore, because I don’t believe that anyone should be born with the right to be better than anyone else. It makes no sense in this society anymore.
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Waterloo always sounded like an exotic place to me, an English garden oasis dotted with fountains and plum trees and those little stone statues of naked angel-babies. The name suggested a swan pond, croquet matches, and crustless triangle sandwiches served at 3 p.m. for tea. Little did I know that the “Waterloo” Ray Davies was singing about in the Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset,” which first topped the pop charts 51 years ago this week, in fact referred to a bustling train station in the center of London, far removed from the green gardens I’d imagined.
It took living in London to come to this realization. Prior to moving there at 21, I had a vague and filmic idea of the place, which would be better described as ignorant and romantic. I had no perception of London as a real metropolis. Like my relationship with New York before moving here, I simply knew I would love it. I decided to love it. And most of that preemptive love came from the British music I listened to as a child and into my teenage years. The influence of U.K. rock stars and punk urchins so influenced my tastes that as a middle schooler I dreamt up a future business plan that paid homage to my heroes across the pond.
When I was about 12 or 13, I let my dad in on this grand scheme of mine. I told him that when I was older, I was going to open a concert venue (/record store/clothing store/cafe, obviously). I would call it, “The London Underground.” My dad, a person who had actually been to London, as well as many other places, explained to me that this name was already taken, and the use of the word “underground” in that name did not mean “obscure” or “edgy,” but “underground” in the most literal sense. This was because that name belonged to the London metropolitan commuter train, which was in fact, subterranean. It would take me a decade to experience what he was talking about firsthand, but by then I’d at least figured out that owning your own brick and mortar business was a pain in the ass, anyway.
For years I subconsciously learned about different parts of London from songs by my favorite bands. The names of neighborhoods and streets would slip out of the mouths of the Jam’s Paul Weller and the Streets’ Mike Skinner, and funnel straight into my memory, where I kept them tucked away as useless scraps of information about a place I’d never been. The English music I loved so much was imparting me with a partial education on the city all along, but I wasn’t able to utilize until I moved there.
I knew from my favorite Tom Waits songs, for instance, that the “dirty old river” Ray Davies sang about in “Waterloo Sunset” was pronounced “temms,” not “Thames” despite its spelling. I’d like to think this saved me from being pegged as “too American” by my British friends, but my refusal to call bathrooms “the toilet” doomed me from day one. I knew there was a Wardour Street from one of the many Jam songs I loved in college, though I did not know where this “Wardour Street” was. When Morrissey sang about “Battersea” in “You’re the One for Me, Fatty,” I thought he was saying “All I’m about to see;” I had no idea he was talking about a South London power plant. I gleaned that Squeeze’s Glenn Tilbrook was singing about a poor couple getting pregnant and falling on hard times in “Up the Junction,” but didn’t realize the title was a pun combining a British euphemism for pregnancy (“up the duff”) and the northeastern neighborhood of Clapham Junction until I was informed otherwise.
When I moved to New York, the city felt paved with scenes from my favorite movies. When I moved to London, I navigated its circular streets with lines from my favorite songs. These songs followed me as much as I followed them, and my daily commute often felt like an interactive playlist. In 2013 I moved back to London for a summer, and spent two months interning at a fashion house in the southwest corner of the city. My commute took about two hours each way, as I lived on the exact opposite side of town. I’d get on the bus at Clapton Pond at 7 a.m. and transfer at Victoria station roughly an hour later. The moment the bus docked at Victoria, my mind’s DJ would invariably cue up “Victoria” by the Kinks. This was the schedule everyday, and it at times felt like the “I Got You Babe” alarm clock in Groundhog Day. Same song. Same Time. Every day.
From my second story bus seat I could see every street name as we rounded their corners. These were names I knew well, but I didn’t understand the significance of them until those early morning commutes. I passed by Wardour Street, where fortunately, there was no a-bomb. I saw signs for Brixton Station, which brought to mind the Clash’s dub-heavy classic “The Guns of Brixton.” I passed Trafalgar Square, and Leicester Square, and Sloane Square, each of which was lassoed to a song in my memory.
These associations are deeply ingrained in my hippocampus, and it never took much for a particular song to spill from my subconscious into my waking mind. When passing Vauxhall station, I thought only of Morrissey’s 1993 solo record Vauxhall and I. When my bus careened through Piccadilly Circus, Morrissey was there, too, with his brazen opening track from 1990’s Bona Drag, “Piccadilly Palare.” At times it felt like my brain was home to a 6-CD changer that swapped discs with the slightest provocation. After five years of living Stateside, things have changed: now when I listen to my favorite U.K. bands, I can picture the days when I stood exactly where they sing about.
An instant pop classic with an old-fashioned twinge, The Hamiltons’ latest single “Take the Hit” is a timeless piece that’ll have you swooning. It’s a unique genre-mashing track in that it’ll transport you from smack dab in the 60s to the mid-90s over the course of a few lulling notes and jazzy vocals.
Based in London after relocating from Sydney, this sibling duo not only performs their own music, but also produce and write it. And their investment in their music is apparent in “Take the Hit”–it’s dripping with passion and affection, carefully honed to present you with an entrancing final product. With influences in jazz, folk, country, and cajan, it’s no wonder their sound is so eclectic.
Three years ago, on a dim June morning at 6 AM, I sat next to some toast at a shoddy Formica table. The table was in a damp, smelly kitchen exploding with mounds of used tea bags, soiled dishes, and sagging cilantro. Only, the latter wasn’t called cilantro, it was called “coriander,” because this kitchen was in Hackney, East London. Clapton Pond to be exact. And you couldn’t find “cilantro” in all of England, let alone in Clapton Pond. These early hours were perfectly serene for me. The moments before my two hour bus commute to the Southwestern tip of the city were quiet and sad, but most importantly calm. Sometimes I would see a little fox in the garden, foxing around. Other times I would sit with a journal and stare at its blank pages as if my retinas could burn words into them. Whatever occurred on a given morning, silence was crucial for peace. So there was a real hiccup in this pre-work routine when my affable flatmate Tom would bounce into the kitchen, pour himself a stout cup of coffee, and flip on the radio to BBC 6 Music
There couldn’t have been a more disruptive gesture with which to stab my lame little ritual. It made me uneasy, serrated with nerves – until I took a moment to actually listen. When I did, it struck me that what was playing was good. Really good. It wasn’t an online podcast, or a publicly funded radio station with biannual pledge drives. This was the BBC, once the home of John Peel. A government subsidized program, playing the likes of Wire, Kiran Leonard, and Stump at six in the morning. Was it for real?
Before long I was the one turning the dial to 6 Music at the crack of dawn, beating Tom to the punch. On weekends, all of my desire to get out of the neighborhood was extinguished by that four hour round trip commute Mon-Fri, and I would often sit in the kitchen for half of the day with a notebook and the radio. I pretended it wasn’t 2013, pretended that the DJs were my only source of know-how, like when Peel ruled the airways.
It is rare that we ingest contemporary culture alongside a hearty helping of surprise. We know the T.V. schedule, we oversee our own Netflix and HBO viewings, we cherry pick song by song on Spotify. Independent radio stations-not Top 40, but rather the few programs that exist outside of the mainstream-are true arbiters of surprise. You never know what will come next, and that is a scarce thing to come across today. The anticipation that perhaps the following track will be by your new favorite band…there is some dose of fate in that, even for someone who doesn’t really believe in fate.
I eventually became obsessed with the station, rolling into work a little later because I simply had to hear the end of that song, and find out who sang it. I began making unwieldy lists of everything I heard, a habit I maintain to this day. The dawn’s greatest priority was still coffee, but the radio was a close second. I was transfixed…how could something so perfect, so seemingly tailored to my tastes exist?
Founded in 2002, BBC 6’s slogan claims that it is “The place for the best alternative music. From indie pop and iconic rock to trip hop, electronica and dance with great archive music sessions, live music concerts and documentaries.” Somehow that statement still seems to be putting it lightly.
Their roster of DJs boasts names like Iggy Pop, Jarvis Cocker, The Fall’s original bassist Marc Riley (my personal favorite) and John Peel’s own flesh and blood: his youngest son Tom Ravenscroft, who turned me on to the likes of Girl Band and Maribou State. This is of course, the tip of the proverbial iceberg, as every host I’ve come across is either a renowned musician, journalist, or producer of some merit. Brush gently at the surface of any 6 Music presenter and you will uncover a rich history in popular culture. These aren’t merely critics, but fans; giddy enthusiasts with the entire BBC archives, Peel sessions, and exclusive interviews at their fingertips.
Their 24/7 programming spans every genre imaginable, sometimes encapsulated in more flavor-specific shows like Stuart Maconie’s Freak Zone and Nemone’s Electric Ladyland. Other times musical styles seem to be picked at random, the only consistent link being the superior quality of each track. One time I heard The Fall in the same set as Tribe Called Quest, which was only to be followed by Kate Tempest. It’s this kind of unfaithfulness that I can appreciate when it comes to record collecting.
If you and I have had a chat about music since June of 2013, chances are you’ve endured me waxing fanatical about this radio station. Not everyone dove right into it, but those who did always mention it when we cross paths. And often, they’ve found their own pocket of programming that I myself have yet to explore. One such convert informed me that he is hooked on Jarvis Cocker’s Sunday Service, a real Christmas dinner of a show featuring not only oddball tunes, but short stories, bits of radio plays, off-kilter sound effects, and of course, Jarvis’s velveteen voice to guide you through it all.
It seems safe to say that if it weren’t for 6 Music, it may have never occurred to me to have a crack at music journalism. Beyond that, I wouldn’t know or enjoy as much, and this goes for contemporary as well as veteran bands. My world would very likely exclude newcomers such as Happyness, Ezra Furman, and Meilyr Jones, all of whom have cropped up on my “Favorite New Artists” list. Some I’ve seen live, others I’ve interviewed; all have moved me to write about them in the hopes that some searching eye will come across my enthusiasm the same way my ears heard the excitement of the 6 Music DJs.
Although the more obvious takeaway has been finding more music to cram in my brain, there has been a much greater reward from listening to this station, and that is the optimism it’s restored in me as a music lover. A good decade of my pre-college life was dedicated to the discovery and devouring of music, and yet when I moved to New York something snapped. I assumed everything was over. There would never be another Smiths, blah blah blah. It was a juvenile stance to take, and one I hope I’ve completely scrubbed myself of. Because if there is anything that BBC 6 has taught me, it’s that people will never stop making music, and through the science of probability, there will always be at least some good music, some great music even. There never was a “day the music died,” just a constant costume change in a perpetual sonic play. There will never be nothing to listen to. You’ve just got to look harder.
London-based Dan Carney is driving the firetruck of every little boy’s childhood fantasy by growing up to become a musician known as Astronauts.
“In My Direction,” the latest single from his debut album Hollow Ponds is spooky folk-pop with cascading vocal harmonies from Carney complemented by a little help from his friend and fellow sorcerer Michael Cranny.
After what I imagine to be top-secret meetings, the video was conceived and created by Armenia-based production company Manana Films. After an opening that sets your skin on fire with the creepy, crawly, yet beautifully intelligent and composed movement of a colony of ants, it stars Armenian actor Andranik Lavchyan roaming around the capital city of Yerevan. The first shot of Lavchyan on the run is startling; he wears a determined and crazed facial expression that elicits both concern for his well-being along with your own.
Unlike the ants that move gracefully in mass with a preordained mission, which he tramples over unawarely while jogging on pavement, Lavchyan’s movements are jerky and and emanate solitude. He is the awkward human soul that haunts the Astronauts’ creative vision.
Shake up your office Friday afternoon and follow Astronauts to the carnival. Enjoy the video below.
Ticket Giveaways
Each week Audiofemme gives away a set of tickets to our featured shows in NYC! Scroll down to enter for the following shindigs.
