Interview: Islet

Why is it that people making excessively unhinged sounds are so often, you know, excessively nice? We’ve arrived at a posh-ale pub upstream from tonight’s venue, the inimitable Norwich Arts Centre, and Mark Thomas, Islet shrieker / synth man extraordinaire is gently offering to buy The Stool Pigeon a pint. Moments later he takes a seat alongside fellow songwriter Emma Daman, an altogether more spritely, wide-eyed cove, and, throughout our exchange the pair steadily exude the warmth of a trusty coal fireplace.

Which brings us neatly back to our initial question: why is it that beneath this munificent sociability lies an electric kernel of chaos? One theory — a good ’un, we’d wager — is that anyone retaining a semblance of old-fashioned dignity these days, is, for better or worse, irredeemably mad. Either way, the fact is that Islet are campaigning to save the day — or at least thrust a guiding sparkler into the night — and if you haven’t already, now’d be a fine time to perk your ears up.

The Cardiff outfit’s January-slated debut LP Illuminated People, set for release on Mark’s self-run Shape Records, is Islet’s first record to benefit from outside influence, namely brainbox composer/producer Drew Morgan, who also worked on the Perfume Genius record. It says here that the full-length is “more coherent” than 2010’s excellent mini-albums, ‘Wimmy’ and ‘Celebrate This Place’. On reflection, you might note that this is actually akin to declaring a box of frogs more coherent than a jar of psilocybin mushrooms. But don’t hold that against them — coherency by any conventional standard is but a foreign currency in this strange land.

While it’s true that the record’s a fairly lucid statement of scattershot, star-jumping, life-loving intent, there are a few things first worth clearing up. Perhaps Mark and Ems will set the record straight.

I’ve spent a few days with Illuminated People but it feels, to me, like a debut album should. It sounds instinctive and unsettled and completely untethered, whereas a lot of bands want to make a ‘well-produced’ and definitive statement. What exactly did you set out to achieve with the album?

Emma: It’s not particularly important to us that it happens to be our first full-length album. Each record we make, in our eyes, is just another record. It’s part of the process, not the definitive sound.

Mark: It’s only got four more tracks than the last thing.

Did you feel pressured to release an album to appease the ‘indie’ machine in any way?

M: I think it was a natural step, really. We did want to make an album, ’cos it opens more doors. But everything’s kind of constrained to a certain way with albums, isn’t it? The whole boring campaign of it all. We don’t really see [Illuminated People] like that. We wanted to make an album because it felt like the right thing to do. But we could well go back to just making a bunch of EPs or whatever next.

E: Our songs tend to be quite long, on the whole: with an album you’ve got a bit more space to breathe, so we can explore a few more different sounds.

M: And it was also because of outside pressures, in a way, at times. Because people are like, ‘Make an album! Make an album! Just make an album, don’t be awkward.’ So it was like, ‘OK, we’ll make an album.’ A bit.

But all that aside, now felt like the natural time?

M: Oh yeah, absolutely. It felt like the right thing to do, basically.

On a similar note, from a cynical point of view it’s worth pointing out the record has arrived just in time for the 2012 ‘ones to watch’ lists. Was there any jiggery-pokery involved there?

E & M: [In tandem, as if suddenly accused of witchcraft] No, no!

M: We’d never think about something like that. I guess… [chuckles] No.

E: Ones to watch lists are probably bullshit anyway. We could very well be on the ones to watch list in 2009, when we first did a gig, 2010, 2011, whatever. You’ll always be new to somebody else.

‘We Shall Visit’

* * *

At roughly 10pm the quartet who’ll tonight comprise the live band (occasionally a three, sometimes a five) emerge from beside the stage, trotting past the Arts Centre’s crowd to dart out by the side exit. This is slightly surprising, because Islet have so far played precisely nothing and are due onstage, like, now. There’s some nervous supping of pints, and finally the band re-emerges through the venue’s rear doors, marching with chain-gang gusto and whacking air particles with handheld wind chime-y contraptions, as if ritually banishing the unsuspecting hip-hop now rapidly fading from the venue’s soundsystem.

And at first you might struggle: is this demented glee, expressed and felt, or faintly try-hard wankiness? As if to prove a point, those pleasant, chiming dings are punctuated by the elastic thump of various band members stamping and jumping on the floor, just when they feel like it, announcing their arrival in high spirits like an offbeat, juvenile fanfare. Things scarcely let up: nailing its colours to the mast, the sprawling ‘Libra Man’ — a rough-hewn, raving nine-minute prog-rave monster — tops the setlist, a decision which might be due a medal for doomed bravery if it weren’t so strangely inspired. Brash, awkward and brilliant, the head-banging foot-flinger, which sounds like Factory Floor making rainbows out of serrated slabs of concrete, explodes with typical energy, as Emma — currently occupying her bass, later to take up the drumkit — stalks madly about the stage like a curious preying mantis. From opposite corners of the stage, meanwhile, Mark and guitarist/stand-up drummer Alex promptly appropriate the ‘Arrested Development’ chicken dance, with the nifty addition of tambourines. It’s a singular experience; and all the more so for hearing such emancipated sounds from a British ensemble…

I think there’s still a huge reluctance among certain British bands to make an album that sounds — for want of a better word — as weird as Illuminated People.

E: I wouldn’t wanna say anything about other British bands, ’cos I’m sure there’s loads of bands that I’ve not come across that are very open-minded…

M: More open-minded than us, I’m pretty sure!

E: And we’re still a group. We’re not like a crazy noise band or sound artists or anything, we still do gigs.

I suppose I’m asking if there’s a sense of reaction against the staple, indie boys thing.

E: I think that we’re influenced mainly by each other, rather than by other groups or other things that we hear. I mean, we like loads of stuff off four tracks and things like that.

M: When we were making the album we did have quite a heavy Broadcast phase — well, I did, anyway.

E: Maybe it’s just other bands and groups and artists that we connect with. People that have a free and fun, expressive way of making music, like Why? and Pavement… So it’s not that we have any reaction like, ‘Guitar bands can go and die!’ Because we love stuff like that as well.

Lke telling a Radio One DJ he can’t premiere a track without using the word ‘amazing’ it’s painfully difficult to navigate an interview with Islet without using ‘weird’ as a verbal crutch. But while Emma’s assertion that there are stranger genre-contortionists out there is true, you feel that what’s witnessed onstage tonight possesses something altogether more unique. Where artsier fare can feel like a sonic obstacle between the listener and artist, Islet are the polar opposite, issuing forth a rampant abundance of exuberance and personality that heads off the potential for annoying nuttiness.

“I wouldn’t wanna say that we have any manifesto or anything,” Emma says of the band’s overriding purpose. “But I think just enthusiasm for doing things and making things — and making things happen. If you want to make a band, just go and make a band.”

Accordingly there’s the feeling that tonight’s gig (where Illuminated People unsurprisingly receives a healthy runaround) is a See It, Leave, Form A Band sort of affair. There’s the ebullient yet cautionary ‘What We Done Wrong’, and a clattering, apocalyptic ‘Filia’, where Mark appeals for a livelier response not by whinnying mawkish, passive-aggressive euphemisms into the mic, but by hopping into the crowd to merry around and wiggle awhile, yanking Alex by his guitar lead by way of invitation to follow suit. No, Islet aren’t mad, you think while looking at them. Feeling is, if those bouncy, pogo-gambolling stage-moves suggest one thing, it’s only that they’re standing on something too big to contain.

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