Hot-headed Cold Pumas will get their claws out if you call them lo-fi...

Words: Stephen Pietrzykowski

When consuming music, it’s impossible to escape the constraints of time. Chronology, duration, rhythm; music can’t work outside of these things. Timing is, in essence, everything.

And time doesn’t necessarily signal progress either, often repeating itself, as with dance music or the way fashions run in cycles. But where Hot Chip might have once demonstrated joy in repetition, Brighton-based three-piece Cold Pumas show there’s also sickness and anxiety, even if unintentional.

Like an endlessly skipping CD that suddenly rights itself, Cold Pumas appear to live in a Groundhog Day moment where metallic riffs circle to the point of nausea, before veering off wildly into something more gratifying. It’s this spontaneous mutability, like Boethius’ ‘wheel’, that is both their tragedy and their hope, as guitarist Patrick explains: “In practice, we constantly play a lot of ‘stock’ bits that sound like worse versions of things we’ve made up already. The repetitive bit itself definitely has to be exciting in the first place. In terms of pushing the audience, I am not conscious of it, but it’s great to know that sometimes we can turn people into wig-out wizards.”

This reliance on tension and release reflects what drummer Oliver describes as the “unresolved” issues between him and brother, Patrick. “We really know how to cause mental pain to each other. Even our subconscious mannerisms have been finely honed to antagonise the other.”

It’s not only each other they’re rallying against. The mere mention of the term lo-fi raises Oliver’s hackles. “I’m going to pretend you didn’t say my pet hate made-up, bullshit genre. I don’t really think that any of the bands we play with sound much like each other. It’s more about shared attitudes and similar approaches.” Despite these protests, being based in Brighton is integral to their approach. The city has long displayed an ability to produce the more outré elements of UK guitar music, and it’s these roots that also beget close-knit relations with the in-the-red fetishists at Sex Is Disgusting. Nevertheless, Patrick holds little sentiment for their hometown. “Brighton is not some musical Mecca. The Great Escape is not that great. There is no (vomit) scene. But realistically there are more people who might like what we’re doing here.” In terms of sound, at least, such distancing seems logical.

Far removed from the pizza-and-Bud knucklehead aesthetics of the now-quite-tedious ‘Dude’ culture they’re affiliated with, Cold Pumas challenge in a way that straight-ahead scuzzy choruses no longer have the power to. Musically, their kindred spirits lie across the water instead, with a sound not dissimilar to that of HEALTH and the associated Smell cognoscenti in LA; an association that befits their tie-in with London-based underground champions Upset The Rhythm.

Pushing aside their tendency towards antagonism and disassociation, Oliver’s description of the band’s motivations is both endearing and universal in scope. “We just like playing things over and over again and then changing suddenly in an attempt to produce excitement and joy.” Wig-out wizards observed, it’s that spontaneous creation of energy that maintains Cold Pumas’ momentum, and keeps that wheel of tragedy and hope constantly turning in their favour.

WORDS BY LUKE TURNER PHOTO BY SAM COLLINS

“Music is like a sport — you can let your aggression out,” says Drum Eyes’ Shige, fresh from a gruelling session on the squash court. “But music is better.”

Drum Eyes are an intense, many-hued group from Brighton, but you might know the Tokyo-born Shige better as snide, earworm electro-experimenter DJ Scotch Egg. Drum Eyes, by contrast, is an ever-growing beast with Shige pulling in members of various other bands (a former Boredom here, a Sloath there) to help realise his vision.

“The chemistry between musicians can make for better dynamics in the music and I couldn’t do that alone,” he says of how his new troupe differs from Scotch Egg. “We aren’t trying to be like any one band or any one thing.”

You can hear that in the six righteous tracks that make up Drum Eyes’ debut album, Gira Gira — not, in fact, a tribute to Swans’ main man, but Japanese for ‘Bling Bling’. The record has elements of prog, psychedelia, strung-out metal and squelching, ancient synths, and such diversity clearly derives from Shige’s own sprawling taste in music. Obsessed by British culture from a young age, he says he was as fascinated by drum’n’bass, happy hardcore and King Crimson as he was by My Bloody Valentine. He learned to play guitar in his early teens and did a spot of DJing before heading to the UK to experience a different culture.

In Japan, underground music is completely separate, maybe because we didn’t have John Peel,” he explains. “He was reaching out from the underground to the overground, and we had no one like that.”

What Drum Eyes share with contemporaries like Teeth Of The Sea and Chrome Hoof is a refusal to accept boundaries and a recognition that making ambitious, almost luridly grandiose music is nothing to be ashamed of in an age where quiet craft reigns supreme. Gira Gira’s rings-of-Saturn guitar, dragon-spewed synthesisers and collapsing staircase heroics can be taken as a tribute to Takeshi Kitano on ‘Hana B’, while ‘Future Police’ and ‘Future Yakuza’ imagine how those two entities will become the same. ‘13 Magician’, on the other hand, was created by Shige’s version of a Drum Eyes Orchestra, which featured 13 musicians playing “three saxophones, three drums and two guitars” …along with other instruments he can’t seem to remember. Perhaps the hazy recollection is understandable, so lost were Drum Eyes in all the hocus pocus of creating a track that sounds like a fleet of alien spacecraft coming to steal your garden shed and take it to the nth dimension.

But this is only the beginning, as Shige claims a second album is well on the way. “Now everyone else in Drum Eyes is contributing to making songs,” he explains, and who knows what magic they have yet to weave.

With that, it’s time to leave Shige down in Brighton, playing hard on the squash court, and cleansing the third eye of the new wave of no-holds-barred British psychedelia. But are Drum Eyes refracting the sounds of so many musical forms through a crystalline prism that they could, in fact, be considered ‘bling bling’?

“Drum Eyes are the complete opposite of bling,” Shige says. “For us, it is a psychedelic panorama — a journey.”

Time to get on board.

“I’m really wary of signing to big record labels,” explains Meursault’s Neil Pennycook. “There has been interest, but we have everything we need to sustain us on an independent like Song, By Toad Records. We can afford to keep making records with the music that we want to write as opposed to keeping to other people’s standards.”

Independence has been a buzz topic north of the border for some time now, politically and musically, and Pennycook is sceptical about the industry with reason. Very little enters Edinburgh in the way of external influence. Big tours bypass the city in the hope of reaching bigger audiences in the more commercially-driven scenes of Glasgow. And as a result, the Scottish capital misses out on everything that the industry drags along with it: media coverage, money, crowds and A&R.

“I think Edinburgh has a history of losing out on publicity,” Pennycook explains. “Your expectation levels when you start out aren’t as high, and you don’t really know what you are aiming for.”

True to his word, Pennycook didn’t really know what he was aiming for when Meursault came to fruition as a solo outlet back in 2005: “It was just me playing with an acoustic guitar, a drum machine and not much else — probably for the best part of a year.” It was something of an abortive start until he drew the attention and aid of local musicians Fraser Calder, Chris Bryant and Calum MacLeod when first attempting to record. “A lot of the band’s forming came down to the fact that I had written the album and had no idea how to play it live or record it,” he explains. “So I had to get a band together to back me up.”

The EP they released around this time captures a band struggling to get a feel for what they wanted to sound like or where they were going with their music. “I think this happens with lots of Edinburgh bands,” Pennycook explains. “It’s the idea of pacing yourself — getting a good idea of what pace you work at and what you are comfortable with, and not forcing things at the expense of the music.”

But by the time they released their critically (but not commercially) acclaimed debut Pissing on Bonfires/Kissing With Tongues, first as a self-release in April 2008, then on Song, By Toad Records in December of the same year, they had developed a distinctive character based around a shifting interplay of electronics and traditional folk instruments.

“I don’t really know where the electronic elements came from,” he says with a laugh. “A lot of the instrumentation we used is just down to what was there and what was available to us — and not knowing anyone who played drums.”

Meursault’s seven-strong troupe is deeply rooted in the city’s live music scene. There is locality in its folk-inflected sound — something of a foundation for the bands to build from in terms of support — but there is also the attitude of the musicians themselves that helps to keep the scene alive.

“Our ethic is all very similar: we are all stubborn as fuck!” Pennycook offers as a collective disposition. “With the industry as it is, we’re all just looking to keep our heads above water. It’s really important in that way to be stubborn and sure of yourself, but also to be realistic and not sell yourself short by any means… It breeds a certain mentality of ‘Ah, fuck ’em [the A&R], we don’t need ’em’.”

Fuck ’em, indeed. Their DIY approach to creating music and sustaining a career thus far lends itself to this warm and fighting posture. New album All Creatures Will Make Merry acts as a bulwark to the collective’s perspective on the situation at hand, evolving their pastoral elements of folk with lo-fi electronics to create something new and enthused.

“When I talk to people about folk music, I kind of dread it,” he explains of the band’s progressive sound. “For a lot of people it’s acoustic guitars with buckets and buckets of twee, but for me folk music is just story-telling.”

So what’s your story? “I don’t really like going into that kind of stuff,” comes a coy reply. “Pissing on Bonfires/Kissing with Tongues was a break-up album — not in the romantic kind of sense, but kind of going through a period in life where everything was changing and I was pitching certain ideals that I had. This record was sort of moving on from that and getting on with things and doing things that would make me happy.”

It’s clear what makes Neil Pennycook happy: his music, which is his music on every level — from the control he has over writing, recording and direction, to the comfort he finds in his results. Insular and awkward perhaps, but there’s a sound and sentiment with Meursault that reaches far further than the borders set against them.

Words by Jim Ottewill  Photograph by Jodi Burian

“I  can talk,” deadpans Lady Chann, Chanelle Williams, the new queen of UK dancehall. She’s not wrong. She whizzes through our chat at breakneck speed, her motor-mouth spitting out words as fast as the rhymes she rides on the mic.

She’s here to discuss ‘Sticky Situation’ — a big tune made in cahoots with garage producer and Ms Dynamite collaborator, Sticky. It slayed dances last year and is now re-emerging with a bassline-based pimping from Sheffield wonderkid Toddla T, and this time the raves are going even wilder.

“Last year was the first time a lot of people had heard of me,” says Lady Chann, “and many of those people would not necessarily be into dancehall.” Doing the rounds with northwest London’s Suncycle crew, who have worked with artists as disparate as Sizzla and pop-rockers Texas, and of which she is an original member, has certainly helped.

I first clocked her ladyship at last year’s Major Lazer Notting Hill Carnival party with Toddla. She was on the mic leading the chaos by egging on a crowd high on sunshine and free energy drinks. “That day was just pure fun,” she reminisces, grinning. “Obviously the free booze helped. It was a never-ending line of rum, Red Bull, rum, Red Bull, rum, Red Bull. I had a gig straight after in Leeds and that’s when I felt ill — really ill. A messy business.”

Her sunny demeanour can’t be dampened by meeting on a pissy Thursday eve in Islington, and not least because 2010 is shaping up very nicely for Lady Chann. Alongside her recent Dun Dem Season mixtape, which features Warrior One, L-Vis 1990, Serocee and Toddla, there’s a debut album in the pipeline. But it’s the reheeling of ‘Sticky Situation’ that’s currently turning the most heads.

“Sticky heard the hook and didn’t even realise it was me singing it,” she explains. “He said, ‘This is next level! Get in and vocal it,’ and the track worked out. But it’s weird thinking, ‘You’re the buzz,’ when it’s just little old me. What I do is normal and not ‘wow’. Those who I think have the ‘wow factor’ are surgeons or dentists. I’m just grateful to have got here.”

Her loveliness in person contrasts sharply with her fiery onstage persona. We watch her at the Old Blue Last in east London where she smashes it with venomous renditions of ‘Sticky Situation’ and ‘Eye Too Fast (Fugitive Riddim)’. This lady may be well mannered, but she’s certainly no wallflower.

“I’m not shy — I’ll tell you what I want and I don’t care what you think of me,” she concludes.

The world of dancehall, and beyond, needs to get ready.

Harlem are quickly earning a name for themselves as party animals.

Not that they care. “Well, fuck!” bellows Curtis O’Mara. “Congratulations to us for being the most fucked-up band possible!”

Although these garage brats signed with Matador last year, O’Mara decided to keep his job as a chef, just to preserve his sanity between tours. “Right now it helps me be normal. If I’m out on the road doing crazy shit, it’s good to do something simpler so I don’t have that desperate anxiety that comes without a linear day-to-day life.”

Asked to elaborate on the crazy shit, O’Mara has no shortage of dope stories. “I was convinced I was trapped inside a cheeseburger. I ended up having a voodoo wedding ceremony in it with some girl I met.”

Bandmate Michael Coomers, meanwhile, was increasingly pre-occupied with the cloud he noticed creeping behind him all day. “Fuck! My mom’s gonna read this and then it’s going to be all over,” he says. “She’s already read enough stuff that makes me look like the worst kid she could’ve possibly had. Although, the other day, she said, ‘You’ve turned into less of a fuck-up than I thought you would.’”

The mischief began when O’Mara and Coomers hung out together as teens in Tucson, Arizona. “We terrorised everybody,” says O’Mara. “We’d drive around, run over garbage cans, pee on our friends, throw beer bottles. We took it there.”

They formed various punk bands, like Teen Suicide and Smart Pussy, each one spurred by the volatile dynamic developing between them. “Sometimes we come at each other like, ‘I can’t stand you!’” says Coomers, slightly disconcerted that he’s just found a heart with a swastika painted on the back of his van. “It’s definitely got all the trappings of any good friendship. Curtis used to refer to me as being the mother and, at first, I didn’t like that. But then I realised that mom’s the one who does all the work and dad just puts on an apron and says, ‘I’m makin’ hamburgers tonight!’ So, yeah — fuck dads, man. They’re the worst.”

They went their separate ways after school, with Coomers drifting from town to town as a couch-surfing stoner, getting fired from every job he’s ever had and either growing bored or wearing out his welcome in the process. His fascination with “witchy” places drew him to various haunted tourist traps, like the sites of Jack the Ripper’s murders in London, totting up plenty of ghostly encounters along the way.

“A little girl came to the bottom of my bed once after a shooting in Oakland,” he says between drags. “She told me to close the window and lock it. That one was really fucked up. Then I went to this house in North Carolina where somebody killed themselves in the bathroom. Though I didn’t know that, when I walked in I thought somebody was behind the shower curtain and pulled it back. So I went downstairs and told my friends, ‘You have a ghost up there!’ They all got bummed out ’cause that was their friend who died.”

The pair eventually reunited in 2007 to start a new band where they could alternate between guitar, drums and vocals. They couldn’t afford to tour so they’d sublet roach-infested shacks between cities, picking up bassist Jose Boyer after finally settling in Austin, Texas. Armed with belting hooks and the effortless swagger of vintage R&B, their bombast erupted into 2009’s self-released Free Drugs ;-) and took shape with its acerbic follow-up, Hippies.

But Coomers is keen to distance their sound from obvious reference-points, like the seminal 1972 garage compilation Nuggets, and bristles at any mention of ‘lo-fi’: “I’ve no idea what that fucking means. Low fidelity? Does it sound like a crappy stereo? Have you ever seen a record player that says ‘lo-fi’? You want to come listen to something on my lo-fi stereo?”

Indeed, he’s been stuck with that label since he began making music and insists that while others actively pursue the aesthetic of shoddy recordings, Harlem simply aren’t talented enough to accomplish anything else. He’s equally modest when it comes to their live show.

“Honestly I think there’s far more interesting stuff on TV. Like... like... like... like... do you know how many advances have been made in TV and how few have been made in music? It’s insane. They have dogs talking and it looks like the dog is actually talking. We can’t do that. We stand there with some archaic instrument acting like we just did a magic trick. If that talking dog was in a band, that’d be entertainment. Even if the dog was just the manager hanging out back or one of the band members’ girlfriends saying, [in squeaky voice] ‘You’re doin’ great, honey!’ I’d be like, ‘This is the best band I’ve ever seen!’”

Coomers is classic frontman material. He’s outspoken, funny, intelligent and temperamental, generating priceless quotes at every turn [“I’m pretty convinced the brain’s just some bullshit that’s a red herring”]. By contrast, O’Mara tears through his points with blunt force. Yet he gushes about discovering Nirvana while blasting a mixtape as a drunken teen, citing the lasting impacting it’s had on him. Recently the band’s growing taste for debauchery has made him reconsider that influence in another light.

“I didn’t think it was an issue until people were like, ‘Hey man, some pretty hardy partyin’ you got goin’ on there.’ I guess sometimes you get swept away. I just love playing music. If I can keep that, I won’t be so suicidal.” When asked if he sees himself burning out or rocking on until he’s senile, O’Mara turns gravely serious. “That’s a scary question. I think about it a lot. I’m not sure which one I’d be most satisfied with. I can’t tell. I just want to be remembered as a nice guy with a pretty face.”

The members of FACTORY FLOOR are as highly charged as the industrial noise they manufacture

Words by Niall O’Keeffe Photograph by Dave Ma

There are many layers to the glorious noise generated by East London’s Factory Floor. There’s the haunting, Mittel-European vocals of Nik Colk, not to mention the squalling and screeching of her guitar as she assails it with violin bow or drum stick. There’s the crunching electronics, marshalled by machine man Dom Butler. There’s the restless, inventive drumming of Gabe Gurnsey. Louder than any of this, though, is the crackle of tension.

At the live shows, it’s a deafening roar. Supporting Martin Rev in London last November, they produced a murderously intense performance but were cut dead by a blown socket barely two songs in, yielding a silence ruptured by Gabe’s Yorkshire-accented swearing. At a January gig at Shoreditch venue Cargo, Factory Floor went one better: bringing a power outage to the entire street with a set-closing storm of feedback. “All the dudes that run the place were running round with torches, looking at us with evil eyes,” Butler recalls.

Simmering tension underpins every note of Factory Floor’s imminent double A-side ‘Lying’ / ‘A Wooden Box’. The former track offers a propulsive two-note synth riff, intermittent shocks of guitar noise, whirlwind percussion, and an ominous, death-obsessed lyric (the title refers to being in a prostrate position, rather than telling untruths). ‘A Wooden Box’ likewise focuses on death, albeit in more terror-stricken fashion, with Nik and Dom trading urgent whispers over a pulverising house track. Questioned about the lyrics of ‘A Wooden Box’, Dom freezes, as if he’s been asked to reveal his darkest personal secret. Eventually he dissembles about the lyric changing all the time.

The single reunites Nik with Blast First Petite boss Paul Smith, who signed her last band KaitO, a Norwich quartet trading in noisy indie-punk. ‘Lying’ / ‘A Wooden Box’ won’t be the first Factory Floor record - it follows a debut 7” and the ‘Planning Application’ EP - but it will be the first since Nik’s recruitment, which all agree has heralded a new dawn for the shape-shifting band, of which Gabe is the longest-serving member. In addition to her voice and guitar wizardry, Nik has brought poise and charisma to a band that previously offered a limited spectacle: that of unassuming blokes indulging a shared interest in clanking sounds.

As interviewees, Factory Floor are charming but prone to bickering among themselves. That crackle of tension is right there in the dictaphone. It flares first when Nik recalls her initial contact with the others, via e-mail. “They asked me to do some singing on a track,” she remembers. “But they wouldn’t let me go down to their rehearsal room, which was really frustrating.” Eventually, she spoke to them at a show at east London’s Old Blue Last. “I made a conscious effort to go and meet them, and then it went from there... They reeled me in.”

Gabe: “That’s a whole lie, all of what she just said.”

Dom: “We didn’t reel her in, she sneaked in. Like a snake under a door. With a top hat on.”

Nik: “Now we work together, I know how they don’t like other people involved, musically, in what they do. So I’m actually amazed that they let me in.”

The boys’ interest had been piqued by electro-pop songs Nik had posted on MySpace under the name Nik Void.

Gabe: “It’s the tone of her vocals that I’ve always really liked.”

Nik: “What about the songwriting and all the programming?”

When Nik eventually joined, Factory Floor assumed a year-zero mentality. “If you walk forward and you’re constantly looking back, you just knock into things,” proclaims Dom. Momentum built quickly. Shortly after coalescing, the new line-up made a fruitful connection with The Horrors, which led to support slots on UK and European tours.

Joining Factory Floor required Nik to overcome misgivings. The demise of KaitO had left scars. “After that experience, I didn’t want to be involved with a band,” she says. “I wanted to start anew and not look back. But I don’t feel like I’m looking back with this. I don’t feel I’m regurgitating what I used to do... I took two years out and now I’m starting again. And I love it again.”

Post-KaitO, Nik has changed the style of both her vocals - lower register, fewer words - and her playing. “[With KaitO] it was a lot about riffs. Now, it’s more assault on the guitar and making different sounds. Being more experimental, but still trying to control that feedback.”

The shared urge to experiment has led Dom and Gabe to acquire a Russian drum machine and a range of analogue synths. “I just really enjoy an analogue sound because it’s alive,” says Dom. “So many bands use these MiniKorg things that are just digital representations of analogue, and it’s just a shame.” This wariness of conservatism is a recurring theme with Dom. “A lot of bands have preconceptions and they can’t break away from them. They don’t say, ‘Let’s see what happens here.’ I dunno, it seems to work with us. If it sounds shit... we just laugh at it. And I crumble and cry.”

Nik: “And sulk for a couple of days.”

Dom: “You’re the sulker!”

Before the dictaphone clicks off, there’ll be time for one more argument. Gabe will say, “They fucking hate me, these two: I’m going, ‘We’ve got to write!’” and Nik will respond, “Oh excuse me! I’m the one who said it ages ago! You just say it, you don’t act. You’re all mouth.”

And so the tension keeps building and building, until the next glorious explosion.

by Louise Brailey

Everyone loves dubstep, right? From Pitchfork to NME, people are falling over themselves to praise a genre formerly restricted to lads from Croydon. But engage Darkstar’s James Young on the subject and the circle jerk is brought to an abrupt halt.

Dubstep is done,” he says. “I think it’s completely had its day. It sounds cold but it makes no difference to me if it stopped now.”

Yikes. While many consider James and his musical partner Aidan Whalley part of the new wave of producers borne from that very scene, they disagree. Even when they were swapping ideas as students they were hard to pin down; James had a predominantly electronic music background, Aidan’s tastes were band orientated. Common ground was a shared love of 2-step, sci-fi and a sense that they didn’t quite fit into the scene that surrounded dubstep’s seminal FWD club. “We were never at home with it,” explains James, “when we made tunes we thought they were better than what was getting played, so we thought ‘if they’re not going to play it, fuck them.’”

This stubbornness finds expression in their off-kilter aesthetic: minor harmonics, processed vocals and a taste for retro-futurism. Recent single ‘Aidy’s Girl Is A Computer’ combines garage syncopation, 8-bit synths and vocoder phrases while previous crossover hit, ‘Need You’, married a harpsichord figure with a robotic vocal beamed in from a dystopian future where robots are too busy nursing broken hearts to take over. All their records, even the early experiments, reject the big room mentality for an affecting emotional economy. Strip away garage signatures and Darkstar make songs, not tracks. Skewed, melancholy pop songs.

It’s this sensibility that caught the ear of Kode9, whose Hyperdub label proved the perfect home for their sound. Forget trite ’nuum theorising, Darkstar feel a deep connection with the eighties synth pioneers. “I was brought up in a very industrial town; I worked the worst jobs you can imagine.” James’s gestures are broad as he describes polishing metal for 12 hours a day. “It strikes me as odd that people like the Human League and OMD had been through very similar things to what Aidan and I had been through. To me it was more than coincidence.”

If the pop thing doesn’t piss off the bassheads, their next move will. Their album will see the boys ditching the vocoder altogether for a shoegaze-driven sound. “We’ll probably get a lot of flack,” says James. “I think people will be quite shocked.”