Sprawl Magazine / Issue 3

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• OVER AND OVER
• AND OVER AGAIN
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leeranaldo

"We always wanted to expand the field of vision rather than narrow it."

A conversation on No Wave, Glenn Branca, alternate tunings, downtown New York, Sonic

Youth, and the preservation of radical energy.

In the early 80s, lower Manhattan wasn't just a backdrop; it was a collision point. Musicians, filmmakers, painters and composers moved through the same rooms, with figures like Jim Jarmusch and Basquiat crossing paths with bands like DNA and the Contortions. Looking back, does No Wave feel historically significant to you, or did it simply feel like the most honest way to make work at the time?

Lee: Looking back, it feels incredibly significant. At the time, it just felt like normal life in New York. Everybody was moving here at that point. It was a kind of flashpoint, but New York has always been a place that attracts all kinds of creative people.

I have to say, one of the big differences was that most people were coming out of university, and they weren't just high-school garage musicians like a lot of the players in the 60s were. Everybody had been trained in one form of the arts or another. People came here to be painters, to make films, to do theatre, or to do all kinds of other things. And everyone, having grown up on rock and roll, just gravitated towards playing music.

It was an exciting time to start playing music. So you had all these people, whether they could play or couldn't play, forming bands and performing. You didn't really have to know how to play in order to play. That was the way it was.

You had people like Jim, who were dying to make films, or people like Robert Longo or Richard Prince, who wanted shows in galleries. All of those things were really hard to do. I came from art school, and Thurston briefly studied at a kind of literary school at university before he dropped out. Arto Lindsay and Glenn Branca came as theatre performers, you know-things like that.

So everybody ended up in the clubs because it was an easy place to meet each other. Everybody started doing bands because it was easier to get a gig than it was to get a gallery show or raise money for a film or something like that. And then you had not only the New Wave bands, which were immediately starting to break through I saw a lot of those people in their earliest incarnations, like Talking Heads or the Ramones or Patti or whatever, Television, the Voidoids but also DNA and the Contortions and all these No Wave bands that were really doing radical stuff. They were the ones who maybe really didn't know how to play, but were still picking up instruments and playing, because that was kind of the root thing of rock and roll.

You don't really know how to do more than a couple of chords; you just make a racket and scream over it, and you've got a band and a song. All those people realised they could do that. It was a time when all these notions of appropriation, deconstruction and minimalism were in the air anyway, so people decided to do that in music.

There's a tradition of musicians coming out of art school, from the Beatles and the Who to whoever. It's where a lot of the best musicians came from, because they were thinking about music as an art form. They weren't learning at conservatoires, learning how to play all their scales and all that stuff like a proper musician. They were thinking about the music they grew up on, which was kind of radical and revolutionary and exciting, and something anyone could do, really.

You had all these people forming bands and, as soon as some of them got their opportunities to make a film or show in a gallery, they started leaping off and leaving the music behind. Some did, some didn't. Jim still does the music for some of his films, Longo still plays in bands, you know. People still keep a hand in, but at that time everybody was meeting in the clubs and playing together. It was just a super-exciting time.

In Conversation

Lee Ranaldo

It was a time when all these notions of appropriation, deconstruction and minimalism were in the air, so people decided to do that in music.

Before Sonic Youth fully developed its own language, you were playing in Glenn Branca's electric guitar orchestra. Those works felt less like songs than immersive structures built from overtones, mass and sheer volume. What did inhabiting that scale of sound teach you about the physical dimensions of music, and did it permanently recalibrate your sense of what a guitar could be?

Lee: Oh, I suppose it did, in a sense. What Glenn was doing, and what Rhys Chatham was doing, and some others, was really kind of revolutionary. They were using the instruments of rock and roll, but wanting to make something more symphonic or orchestral with them, and Glenn was really the most radical. His music translates when you listen to it on record, but when you were actually standing in front of it and being confronted by it, it was like a force. You'd never heard anything like it before.

It was super-incredible, shortly after moving to New York, to fall in with him and start playing with him. I'd seen him perform a couple of times, and the same with Rhys, and they were doing something nobody else was even trying to do, let alone doing well. They were taking elements from the minimalist composers who were around then - Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, La Monte Young and all that stuff but they were also taking, say, the last three chords of a Who song or something like that. They were combining all of that with electric guitars and doing this really radical stuff, so it was super-impressive to hear what he was doing.

Even as radical as any of it was as radical as Teenage Jesus, or DNA, or the Contortions, or Glenn, or Rhys everybody in New York was trying to do something out of the ordinary. It meant that, even though the things being done there were pretty radical and weird and wild, if you lived there it just kind of felt like the norm. Nobody was really trying to play regular old-fashioned rock songs. I mean, there were people doing it, and they were sort of throwbacks in a sense, but most of the people we hung out with were working in one kind of radical form or another. So it just felt normal. Every band you saw was doing some weirdo thing that nobody had ever heard before.

Although someone like Glenn was such a forceful personality that he really did stand out. Or Lydia. And David Byrne, for that matter. But everybody was doing strange stuff like that, so you felt part of a community. It felt normal.

When Sonic Youth first started playing outside New York, that's when we began to realise how weird what we were doing actually was. In New York it was just like, 'OK, everybody's doing something weird', so it felt normal. But as soon as we started going to Europe or travelling around the US, you noticed people's reactions were like, 'What the fuck is going on?' And that made us see it in a different way.

When Sonic Youth formed in 1981, you were drawing from punk, minimalism, free jazz and composers like John Cage, yet you've said you didn't initially realise how 'freaky' the music sounded to audiences. Was there a moment when you recognised that you weren't just part of a scene, but articulating something that didn't yet have a precedent?

Lee: Well, outside of New York, none of that stuff really had a precedent. It just so happened that we came up alongside bands like Swans, Rat at Rat R, Live Skull and a bunch of others. We were a little younger than Glenn and Rhys and people like that, but for some reason Sonic Youth had some early opportunities to take our music outside New York. Before most of those other bands, we just put together a couple of small tours in, like, 1982.

We went out to the Midwest. We played this kind of gig that paid good money at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and then we went down to Atlanta on a separate tour. Us and Swans did those two tours before any of our friends were getting out of New York at all. We were just like, 'Let's go on tour!' We were kind of inspired by the bands from the West Coast and DC in the hardcore movement, like Minor Threat and Black Flag and Minutemen. They were putting their own tours together just by sending postcards to friends saying, 'Is there some place in your town we can play?' So we kind of took a page from that and just started doing these tours.

After I'd been in Glenn's band for a year, we went to Europe, toured the US and then were going back to Europe. By then Glenn had expanded the line-up and added Thurston, and Sonic Youth had already started. On that European tour in 1983, we asked promoters whether our own band could come back the next month. Kim and Bob Bert flew over and we played our first European tour. Seeing those audience reactions made us realise that what felt normal in New York was, elsewhere, genuinely radical.

Branca also launched a label and invited Sonic Youth to be its first release. What did you absorb from him about authorship and the importance of building your own infrastructure?

Lee: The main thing I would say is that back then there really weren't indie labels or anything like that. There was nowhere for bands like us to record. You weren't going to get signed to Warner Brothers or whoever. There was literally no place to get your music out. In England, you had the weekly music papers hunting for the latest thing, but there was nothing like that here apart from a network of hardcore fanzines. Rolling Stone wasn't covering it or anything like that.

Glenn found a backer in a guy named Josh Bayer. In Neutral Records, Josh put up the money and Glenn chose the artists. When Glenn decided to start his own label, it was kind of done in that tradition of artists disseminating their own work. There were a couple of small artist- run labels doing something similar, but nobody was really doing it with rock-based music. Glenn was, in a way, one of the first to do something like that.

I mean, he'd been on one of the first indie labels in New York, 99 Records. That's who put out his early records, essentially - the one I was on. So he kind of picked up that baton and was just like, 'I'm going to make my own label and release all this radical stuff', because he was excited by what he was seeing around him in New York. Thurston and I were in his band at that point, and he was already friendly with Kim, and I think he had a great respect for the three of us. To us, we were kind of floored when he asked us to be the first record.

It was within about six months of starting the band. We played for four or five months, the three of us, just as a trio without a drummer. It was just bashing on stuff and making noise and singing. Then we found our first drummer, Richard Edson, maybe five or six months in, and I think we started in July or August of '81 and Richard joined us in, like, November or December.

In Conversation

In December we played this small festival there, and Glenn saw us. It was right after that that he said he was impressed. He was just like, 'I want you guys to be the first record on the label!' and it kind of blew us away, which was really cool.

They had the money to send us to this studio in Midtown called Radio City Recording, or whatever the exact name was, and it was this big, fancy room where you could have fit a 50-piece orchestra. We only had two days there, basically one to record and one to mix five songs, but within six months of forming we had a record and were working in this really prestigious studio.

So a lot happened pretty quickly for us.

/ Lee Ranaldo

"Seeing those audience reactions made us realise that what felt normal inside New York was, elsewhere, genuinely radical.

In Conversation / Lee Ranaldo

In Sonic Youth, alternate tunings weren't decorative; they were foundational. By altering string tensions and inserting objects like drumsticks and screwdrivers, did those tunings allow the music to move somewhere less predictable, more unstable, more intuitive? How did that approach shape the way the band composed and interacted with sound over time?

Lee: Well, it did. I'd been playing with alternate tunings since I first learned guitar as a teenager, partly from the things blues players were doing. When I first picked up a guitar, I had an older cousin who showed me some tunings for Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young songs. The thing about an open tuning is that, even if you don't know how to play very well, you immediately have something that sounds really nice. It doesn't sound like standard guitar tuning. With an open tuning, you can use one finger and get all this great stuff happening, so it was an easy way to sound good before you really knew how to play.

Then we saw what Glenn and Rhys were doing with open-tuned guitars, and we were aware that Lou Reed was doing things like that in the Velvet Underground this ostrich guitar thing where all the strings were tuned to one note. All of that was influential.

The other part of it was that when we first started, we just had two or three really cheap guitars, and they wouldn't stay in normal tuning very well. We may have tried on the first record, but that was the only one we ever did like that. We realised that if we tuned them to something different and it sounded weird, it was easier to get away with it, or sometimes just tune them to whatever. 'Detuning them', as we called it just not tuning them to anything, really, and using them as these noise-making machines · that's kind of how it all started.

When we first started using these open tunings, we immediately realised they set us apart in the way we sounded. We didn't sound like any band playing G chord, C chord and D chord. We didn't know what chords we were playing. We were just playing things that sounded good to our ears, and that became the sound. The combination of what Thurston and I were doing on our guitars didn't sound like anything anybody else was doing, at least for that first decade. Later, other bands started using tunings like that, but certainly through the 80s we had a sound that really set us apart.

Across three decades, Sonic Youth moved through abrasion, melody and abstraction, yet the underlying impulse remained consistent. Stripping away genre labels, what actually held the band together at its core?

Lee: I think as soon as we really started playing together, the three of us, and later when Steve joined, we found we had some way of working together that was very special. I don't think we ever voiced it in those terms, but I think we had a kind of wilful determination to keep pushing forward through those years when we didn't make any money doing it and were sleeping on floors. We were so confident that what we were doing was something interesting and special, and all the way through, across all three decades, I think we felt that.

As the band evolved through the second and third decades, we all started doing a lot of other stuff, but we always realised there was something about what we were doing in Sonic Youth that was more than the sum of the four of us. We could all go away and do other things, but it never had that greater-than-the-parts situation that Sonic Youth had, you know?

I just think we were of a like mind about a lot of things, and that held us together, kind of like a family in a sense. In a lot of ways, we were like a family, because we did so much together, and we shared books and enthusiasms for different music, or films, or painters, or whatever. We just had a similar mindset about what we wanted to do, and it really, really clicked.

Ciccone Youth took its name from Madonna, and the project covered her music while also featuring collaborators like Mike Watt and J. Mascis. Thurston described it as a way to 'break down barriers between the underground and those who had graduated to the mainstream'. How do you think Ciccone Youth collapsed those distinctions without compromising the downtown ethos?

Lee: For us, it happened at a very particular moment. I think that record and Daydream Nation were done back to back. Daydream Nation felt like the culmination of everything we'd learned through Evol, Bad Moon Rising and Sister, and by then we really knew how to work together in an amazing way.

At the same time, in late-80s New York, hip hop was becoming a huge force, and we were early fans of it. When we were working on Daydream Nation, Public Enemy were across the hall from us, which was a big thrill. We felt that rap and what we were doing were two strands of urban folk music, one coming out of the Bronx, the other out of lower Manhattan.

We were enthusiastic about what hip hop musicians were doing, and Martin Bisi, who'd worked with both avant-garde artists and hip hop acts, helped open that up for us. We genuinely liked Madonna, Prince and Springsteen, as well as all the more underground things, so none of that crossover felt contradictory.

We started sharing our enthusiasm for Madonna with Mike Watt, who was also a big Madonna fan. We loved the Minutemen so much. When we first started going to California, we began hanging out with him and getting to know those guys; we'd seen plenty of their shows. I don't know exactly how it started, but we both wanted to cover Madonna songs.

Mike covered 'Burning Up', and we did 'Into the Groovey' at Martin Bisi's studio, with him helping with the drum programming and all that stuff. After those covers, we thought, 'Let's make a whole album like this.' We booked studio time without really having songs, just some rhythm tracks, and made noise over them. It didn't turn into a hip hop record, but it did become a pretty experimental one for us.

It's really the only time we played around that much with rhythm machines and studio construction, because usually we were a band that worked songs out in a room over months and then went in and recorded them.

In Conversation /

Lee Ranaldo

There was also a personal layer to it: reaching out to Mike Watt after D. Boon's death. How did blending that intimate purpose with playful, pop-inflected experiments reflect Sonic Youth's broader approach to friendship and cross-pollination within the scene?

Lee: We were friends with all those guys, and we saw them play a bunch when they first came to New York. Then, when we started going out to California, we'd see them play there too. It was pretty intense when D. Boon died. Actually, we were playing in LA with Swans in this big warehouse on the night he died. I was playing through his amps the night he died.

We didn't bring amps across the country, and the amp I was using had 'Minutemen' written on the side. It was D.'s amp. The next morning, we heard that he'd died out in the desert in this van accident. And D. and Mike were like childhood buddies, so it hit Mike really hard, and for a while it seemed like he wasn't even going to do music any more, you know? So we were constantly checking in with him. We felt really concerned for his wellbeing in that period, and I think the first thing that happened was that he came to New York while we were making Evol.

There's this song I sang, 'In the Kingdom #19', and it was a pretty experimental track that we'd kind of fooled around with in rehearsal, but we didn't really have it together, and we were just going to finish it in the studio. I think all three of us were playing guitar on it, but we asked Mike to come in and play bass. I think it was one of the very first music things he did after D. Boon died. So he played on that song, 'In the Kingdom'. He came to Martin Bisi's studio and played on it with us, and then sometime after that he formed Firehose with this guy Ed from Ohio, and we took them out on some of their first tours together.

We did this tour called the 'Flaming Telepaths' tour and went around the US, and I think it was Mike's first tour since the Minutemen had stopped. So we were kind of instrumental in a few things that, I think, helped Mike get back on his feet in that period.

The Madonna fixation and the whole Ciccone Youth thing was really just another extended step in that, but it started with 'In the Kingdom', and that was in '85 or something like that. The next year we did Sister, and then we went on this tour with Firehose, the 'Flaming Telepaths' tour. Mike's a dear friend. I was emailing with him this week, actually, for the first time in a little while. I think we formed a bond with him that was just really strong.

You've said, 'The greatest fulfilment hasn't come from a particular record or accolade but from simply continuing the path you began in your youth.' In a culture that often demands either constant reinvention or nostalgic repetition, what has remained intact in you since those downtown years, and what have you had to relinquish in order to keep evolving?

Lee: I think a lot of the same spirit that animated us when we started is still there. It was basically: 'OK, I'm not really a skilled person. I'm not a skilled musician, certainly. Maybe I'm not a skilled painter, or whatever it is. But I want to do this, and I feel like I have something to say.' I don't think that's changed very much. Along the way with Sonic Youth, we got more skilled at what we were doing, especially through working with open tunings, and we got deeper into the vision we had. That really sustained us.

We had a song on one of the later records called 'Radical Adults Lick Godhead Style', and the idea behind it was that the people who meant the most to us were artists with these long careers people who didn't stop when they got famous at 20, or 30, or 40. Their whole life was dedicated to the process of what they were doing. They weren't there for the fame or the money. And after they got those things, they just kept going, because that was why they were there. So we looked at people like Neil Young, Yoko, and painters like Picasso and Matisse. They were successful early on, but they didn't stop.

A lot of times in music and we saw this with plenty of English bands people would have one big hit and then spend the rest of their career trying to match it. Because we didn't have that kind of pressure, our career could follow its own trajectory. We could bring in Jim O'Rourke, become a quintet, then shift again. We were never boxed in by trying to recreate one peak.

When we did interviews, we were always more interested in talking about what was exciting to us: Dinosaur Jr., Pavement, Beck, a film, a book, a painter. Our vision was one of inclusion. We always wanted to expand the field of vision rather than narrow it, to bring more people into what we were about.

Most bands are pretty self-centred in interviews, which is understandable, but part of what made us who we were was that New York period, when everyone was exchanging ideas. We wanted to bring bands we loved on tour, watch people who were blowing us away, and widen the circle rather than close it. That was always a big part of what mattered to us: from punk bands to big stars, from Neil Young to young artists just getting started, it all felt like part of the same invitation. Bring more people to the party.

When we first toured Europe and beyond, people expected us to be dark, wasted, dangerous people because of songs like 'Death Valley '69'. But what we found was that a lot of people living those genuinely strung-out lives weren't actually making the most interesting art. We wanted to keep the radical energy in the work, not in the lifestyle.

We wanted to live in nice places. We all raised children and called our moms on Sundays, or whatever it was. We wanted to keep all the radical elements in the art, and not try to make life itself radical. A lot of the people we saw doing that weren't making the most interesting art. In a way, it often seemed more pedestrian.

And we wanted the art to be raging and radical and furious and beautiful and everything else, and our daily lives to be like, food in the fridge, you know? Our dressing rooms on those tours and in those cabins were always the wholesome places, where people weren't out of their minds and staring into the corner or whatever. We were playing Scrabble or listening to the latest records we'd bought that day, things like that. We spent our days going to bookshops and record shops and museums in every city in the world. That was what we wanted to do.

In Conversation / Lee Ranaldo

We always wanted to expand the field of vision rather than narrow it.

How did you bet on yourself? At what point did you think, 'I'm going to do this. This is something I want to live by'?

Lee: I studied art and cinema at college. Once the New Wave stuff started happening, I immediately started playing music again with people and literally moved to New York, because I was in my first band and that's how Thurston and I met. We were both there with our first bands his was called the Coachmen and mine was called the Flux · and we moved there to try to get some gigs and play at CBGB and Max's. I had a degree in my back pocket, but it didn't seem to mean anything.

I don't know how much we really thought of it as betting on ourselves. We got a cheap place to live and started hanging out, not really thinking about anything in terms of career or, 'How am I going to support myself, or have a family?', or any of that stuff.

There was so much going on that it completely occupied you. Some friends I'd played music with got scared of that unknown life and took straight jobs, and years later they'd say, 'Man, I wish I could have done what you did.' But we weren't really thinking in terms of career. We were just thinking, 'How can I be creative?'

There'll always be people who want to be artists and can't live under a boss for forty hours a week. We had jobs early on, but they were only there to pay the rent. As soon as we made even a little money from music, we quit and decided this was what we were going to do. And it just snowballed from there.

Words: Ria Serena

• SONIC YOUTH
• CBGB
• OMFUG
• HOLL
• NO In Conversation / Lee Ranaldo

WRITE FOR

ulrika

LEAGU spa

• cek
• Ulrika Spacek / EXPO
• EXPO

Words: Alice Beard

For the past decade, Ulrika Spacek have carefully crafted a world entirely of their own. Carving out a space within chaos, their blend of warped electronics, fractured melodies and restless experimentation has seen their sound develop into something deliberately disorientating. Time has not dulled this instinct; it has only refined it. Though the core of their sound remains intact, each new project has pushed the boundaries further, testing the very limits of their musical identity.

Their fourth album, EXPO, feels like the clearest and most confident articulation of that evolution yet. Released on 6 February 2026, the record was shaped through distance and fragmented methods of collaboration, but it never sounds disconnected; instead, it turns separation into a kind of shared language. The result is a record that feels at once tense and unified, built from jagged structures, dreamlike textures and a persistent sense of movement.

Rather than retreating into abstraction for its own sake, Ulrika Spacek use that instability to say something sharper about the world around them. ― one increasingly marked by anxiety, hyper- individualism and the collapse of anything resembling certainty.

Expanding an already broad sonic palette with glimmering textures, saturated rhythms and moments of deliberate emotional introspection, Ulrika Spacek take control of the change that attempts to dictate them.

Their past foundations remain the same, but what grows from beneath feels newly defined and unwavering in its confidence. Less searching has led to self-assurance. Throughout their latest project, a quiet conviction takes hold, drawing together all of their best elements into something unmistakably their own.

There's a tension running through parts of EXPO that feels very of this moment. Over the last decade, what outside pressures-political, economic or cultural have actually forced changes in how you write, rather than just colouring the lyrics?

Rhys: I guess the obvious answer would be displacement from each other. We've gone from living in a shared house together, writing and recording, to a point where some of us now live in different countries. Although whether that has completely changed how we write could be debated. We still very much deliver work as a collective, but we often work on our individual musical contributions in solitude.

We very rarely get together in a room and just jam, although that does still have a time and place for us. It's much more common for us to be in the same room discussing the music rather than recording the band as a whole all at once. But perhaps you could say that displacement, and the pressure to make money outside the band, means we've increasingly worked in solitude, putting the pieces together to make something truly collective.

Ulrika Spacek / EXPO

"WHEN THE THEME OF HYPER-INDMDUALISM

CAME TO THE FORE IT FELT IMPORTANT NOT TO WRITE HYPER-INDMDUALISTICALLY."

RHYS EDWARDS

Was there anything you deliberately avoided writing about on EXPO― subjects that felt too obvious, too neat or too easy to resolve?

Rhys: No, I don't think anything was off the table thematically. There was perhaps more of a focus, as a lyric writer, on looking outwards a bit more. Not in a preachy way - I always write in a way that's a bit of a neurotic discussion with myself - but when the theme of hyper-individualism came to the fore, it felt important not to write in a hyper-individualistic way; less 'woe is me', and more reflections of myself in this confusing, alienating world around us.

You've described the creative process for this record as being like a 'jigsaw' or a 'scrapbook'. What does that look like in practical terms when you're writing and assembling songs, and how much of the record was shaped by accident or misalignment?

Rhys: Well, it is in fact very hard to sit down with an instrument and just write a song. When you have multiple albums out in the world, it becomes harder, because the thought of sitting down and writing something uninspired becomes more and more terrifying.

The purest ideas come from an almost childlike state of play, so we just made sure to record any little fragments when messing around. That could range from trying out a new drum machine for the first time when you don't know what you are doing, to even testing the mic placement on a piano before an artist comes into the studio to record. It was about capturing little moments or ideas, then putting them in a big Dropbox folder, which we used as a sample bank.

The thrill of bending and warping ideas together from separate, distinct places was fun and inspiring, and it always leads to more interesting music than sitting down at an instrument and hoping a genius piece of songwriting comes. We have always written in a patchwork-type way in terms of ideas, but this time we leaned into it more and went one step further.

As with all Ulrika Spacek releases, the artwork and visual palette feel essential to the record rather than decorative. The EXPO cover has a fragmented, schematic quality - part map, part diagram. Is the artwork intended to guide how the record is 'read', or to unsettle first impressions and resist a fixed narrative?

Rhys: Yes, we place great importance on the visual language of a record. We love how it wraps itself around the music and becomes entwined with it. As always, we had the cover in place even as a placeholder - very early on in the process. It often acts as a bit of a lighthouse when trying to navigate artistic decisions.

The only difference this time was that we didn't do the artwork ourselves. It was something we found online by an artist based in Kazakhstan. We were really pleased that he was open to us using it as the cover, as it would have been a painful process reimagining something else.

Ulrika Spacek / EXPO

EXPO

Released February 6, 2026 Ulrika Spacek via Full Time Hobby Music

On this album, did texture or sound design ever replace traditional songwriting, moments where sound itself was doing the emotional or narrative work rather than melody or lyric?

Rhys: It's very seldom that one of our songs starts with the songwriting. The song kind of reveals itself further down the line. We kind of start with the sound design.

This record was very much built from the drums up. We put so much saturation on the drums that sometimes melodies would come out of it, but I am proud to say that we are a fairly experimental group that does write 'songs'.

It's always a fun challenge to find the song in the sonics, and I think it's quite a signature thing for us. On this record, we did try to leave more passages without vocals, though.

In that way, it was a bit more like our first album, where we had hypnotic sections, and in answer to your question, we did leave more space for the music to deliver the emotional narrative.

Compared to earlier records, did EXPO feel like a rupture or a refinement, and was that shift intentional, or only obvious in hindsight?

Rhys: Compared to earlier records, did EXPO feel like a rupture or a refinement, and was that shift intentional, or only obvious in hindsight?

It felt like a new chapter. We hit the ground running, really, and felt like we had all gone up a level in our ability to get across what we wanted. There was definitely a will to push into new ground, but there was also a kind of quiet confidence and comfort in the sense that we felt we knew who we were as a band. One of the nice things about having multiple past albums is that we have left many seeds in earlier records, so you can almost use yourself as a reference point. Even though people often refer to us as a 'psych' band, we actually feel that we have built quite a broad sonic palette across our discography to play with, and there are quite a few offshoots we can pursue if we want to.

It's been a decade since the album The Album Paranoia. Looking back over that ten-year span, how do you feel the band's perspective and priorities have shifted?

Rhys: Wow, yes, a decade that is crazy. Well, I think we are still similar people with a similar outlook on music, and with a fascination for world-building. Making and playing music was perhaps a bit more entwined with hedonism back then, but ultimately I'd like to think we are in a place we would have wanted to be. Of course, you would always like to have a bigger audience, because you want your music to connect with as many people as possible, but I think our younger selves would be happy with being able to tour America and Europe. Back then, we would probably have wished to be doing that every day of the year. Now we have to make sure touring is balanced with holding down separate incomes and looking after our families.

Ulrika Spacek / Interview

At this stage of the band, does making records feel more about asserting creative control than responding to scenes, cycles or prevailing trends, and how conscious is that shift when you're working on new material?

Rhys: Well, nothing is made in a vacuum, but I would say that, when working on an album musically, we kind of turn in on ourselves. We do spend a lot of time living inside the record we are making, and often it's quite exhausting to listen to loads of music. But the time between releasing an album and starting a new one is usually a good time to listen to lots of music. It's almost like getting good nutrition. We also find touring an album a great time to share music with each other in the van.

Ulrika Spacek / Interview

"IT ESSENTIALLY MEANS YOU ARE BLENDING FOREIGN IDEAS AND, IF YOU CAN MAKE IT WORK, WHICH IS PART OF THE CHALLENGE, IT CAN REALLY LEAD TO MAGIC."

RHYS EDWARDS

You've spoken about using techniques such as sampling and pitch-shifting on this record, including Al-assisted 'female' vocals. Did it feel like a natural extension of your existing approach, or did it open up new emotional or creative possibilities within the band?

Rhys: We've just got better at production. Since the band's formation, we have recorded ourselves, and we've just become more capable of using the computer, pedals or synths to process sound in the way we want it to sound. It's one of the reasons why we keep going. It's fun to learn and to broaden the possibilities of what you can say sonically.

Working this way, did it change anything practical in the room how parts were written, recorded or performed or did it mostly shift how you thought about voice, authorship and presence in the music?

Rhys: Well, it certainly meant that we could work together and separately without actually being in the room. I think a big part of being in the 'room' is trying to bring each other together. That can be a great thing emotionally, but it can also narrow the playing field when working on music. Having separate fragments meant that ideas were pulling away from each other, and that can be musically interesting. It essentially means you are blending foreign ideas and, if you can make it work, which is part of the challenge, it can really lead to magic."

But we tried to make the record ebb and flow a bit. That's mainly why we ended both sides of the vinyl with tracks that were very much written and recorded whilst being in the same room. Across an album, we have always loved contrast, tension and release, and working more remotely and in isolation, as well as together in a room, allowed us to push these contrasts further.

Ulrika Spacek tour the UK this autumn

Tickets on sale now ulrikaspacek.com

• AND >YOU
• I AM FIGHTING WITH MYSELF
• I AM FIGHTING WITH MYSELF
• I AM ON THE OTHER SIDE
• I AM ON THE OTHER SIDE
• INDEX FINGER
• INDEX FINGER
• NOT
• NOT
• HELPING
• HELPING
• ARE ARE AND YOU
• I AM FIGHTING WITH MYSELF
• I AM FIGHTING WITH MYSELF
• I AM FIGHTING WITH MYSELF
• I AM ON THE OTHER SIDE
• I AM ON THE OTHER SIDE
• INDEX FINGER
• INDEX FINGER
• NOT
• NOT
• HELPING
• ARE YOU
• HELPING
• ARE AND Artwork Steph Dutton

Most nightlife photography dies on impact. All flash, all vanity, all somebody glaring into a toilet mirror while the room sweats itself dry. It usually starts and ends inside the venue, where the night still exists.

Mischa Haller's photographs begin later than that. When the room inside the world starts to wake, pulling the covers back from the afterglow. When the shutters come down, when the bouncers have unlocked some poor kid's head, when the music has finally collapsed and everybody is left blinking into that blue-grey smear of early morning.

His work does not romanticise nightlife in the obvious way. Haller finds the city off-guard, half-asleep, half-mangled, strewn with wrappers, smeared make- up and true connection. These pictures begin when the main event is over and another stranger, shabbier, more human version of the night takes over. The hour when hunger, exhaustion and euphoria all meet.

In Conversation with Mischa Haller photographer

In Conversation / Mischa Haller

In the photographs, the city feels both spent and alive. The people inside them look elated, half-lost, fully present, caught in that strange suspended state where time seems to come loose from its hinges.

The hedonism is there, but not in the easy sense. What Haller is really photographing are thresholds. Yesterday and today, youth and its vanishing act, freedom and the systems that slowly close around it.

For over three decades, he has returned to that territory, photographing not just people after parties but places unsettled in themselves. In Britain, the 1990s still carried a loose, half-naive optimism. In Warsaw, the night moved differently, a city remapping itself in real time, with the past still pressing on the present and the future arriving at speed.

Across the post-club images collected in Not Going Home, the frantic European haze of Wasted in Warsaw, and his latest series, Not Done Yet - a dawn-side portrait of Glastonbury, the same instinct keeps surfacing. Find the slippage between yesterday and today. Find the city after the city.

ELLIOTT century

BOB CROW, RMT deputy general secretary, and JULIE WATERSON on Labour and the unions PAUL FOOT and CAROLINE BENN speak on Labour's first leaders prize winning biologist and autho STEVEN ROSE PLUS ENTERTAINMENT AND MUSIC, INCLUDING BRIDGEWATER FOUR TRANFERING FROM THE NATION

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Credit card booking ad and Marsh

For Haller, the pull of those early hours was simple enough. The atmosphere was doing two contradictory things at once. The city had gone quiet, almost tender, but the people moving through it were still charged, still fizzing, still running on the last electrical surge.

'I love the early morning light and atmosphere. On the one hand the cities are quiet and serene, but on the other, people are streaming out of nightclubs really awake and buzzing. It's a nice contrast. I also just wanted to see what people were doing after a night out in this in-between state, between yesterday and today.'

Haller's photographs are less interested in nightlife as spectacle than in nightlife as suspension. Not the peak, but the strange plateau afterwards; the social debris it leaves behind.

'What is striking when you walk around cities at 4am is that the rubbish from last night is still there. Around 5am the cleaning crews start their work and then overlap with the clubbers that are still going strong.'

In Conversation / Mischa Haller

NARXISM

Workers resetting the city while the last survivors of the night are still trying to outlast it. Two different versions of morning brushing shoulders under sodium light. Haller never forces the point.

'I really try to just observe and not impose myself onto the scene.'

That distance is what keeps the work from collapsing into either sneering documentary or rose-tinted clubland mythmaking. The images are too humane for one, too clear-eyed for the other. The cafés, kebab shops and all-night counters begin to feel like accidental theatres - places built for speed and function briefly becoming sites of communion, argument and collapse.

'They are the focal points where people congregate at that hour, so all the action is concentrated. Because most places are shut at that time, these places have a special feel to them, like another world. A place where exhaustion, hunger and euphoria meet.'

"I REALLY TRY TO JUST OBSERVE AND NOT IMPOSE MYSELF ONTO THE SCENE."

In Conversation / Mischa Haller

Haller was shooting on film, with a Canon EOS-1N and a 28-70mm zoom: practical, soft enough to hold the mood, and portable enough to keep moving.

'The only worry was about having enough light in those days as film is not great to shoot in the dark. Digital is better suited for that.'

That limitation helped. These photographs do not feel clinically rendered. The softness and slight unevenness add to the sense that the images were dragged out of the hour rather than cleanly extracted from it.

Seen now, they read as documents of more than nightlife. They carry the residue of a wider mood

― that particular social looseness that belonged to the 1990s before the century turned harder, more paranoid, more boxed in.

'I really think it was the decade, the 90s, that just felt so positive and carefree. We really thought this is the end of the Cold War and world peace is possible, so we partied hard without any worries. And then 9/11 happened, which was a wake-up call for all of us.

'Nightlife was maybe still a bit more independent and fluid, always evolving and changing. We were always looking for the next new thing in a new area that was still affordable.'

Culture finds the gap, money follows, life gets priced out.

"WE WERE ALWAYS LOOKING FOR THE NEXT NEW THING IN A NEW AREA THAT WAS STILL

AFFORDABLE."

Wasted in Warsaw lands in a different city, and in a different historical weather. In summer 1998, Haller and journalist Kate Spicer went to Warsaw to photograph the city's nightlife, moving through its clubs and bars day and night. But the pictures gain their charge from more than nightlife alone.

Warsaw in the 1990s was changing quickly after the collapse of communism: private business and services were expanding fast, while the city still carried the architecture, symbols and historical weight of earlier regimes.

WFZ_1623

In Conversation / Mischa Haller

'It felt looser, with a desire to move forward at a very fast, almost violent pace. Things were slowly changing, but the past was still weighing heavily on the present.'

Photography became serious for him in the early 1990s, when he began shooting Switzerland's techno and club scene for magazines at weekends. He learned the trade in the traditional manner, by assisting.

'When I was ready to start on my own, I knew I wanted to be a documentary photographer, that's what I enjoy the most.'

London followed in 1998, bringing commissions from magazines and weekend supplements, and with them the post-club photographs that would become some of his best-known images.

That same thread runs through Haller's latest book, Not Done Yet, which turns its attention to Glastonbury. Again, not the spectacle, but the space in-between: Glastonbury after the day's machinery has briefly stopped selling itself back to you.

"In the early morning hours, the place is kind of upside down compared to the daytime. The stage areas are empty except a security guard and left-over litter from last night. The quiet areas are buzzing with people not done yet. I felt the place and the people that were still around became visible again."

The deeper politics of Haller's images lie in a strange, fragile kind of unmanaged authenticity: the moments everyone else has chosen to file under "aftermath".

This catalogue of images holds that familiar mix of depletion and optimism found in Not Going Home: bodies running on fumes, the candle stubbornly burning at the other end, and the private refusal to let the thing end.

The images work through reversal. The officially important spaces are dead. The peripheral ones come alive. Once the centre has stopped performing its own significance, the people still hanging on become visible again.

The real charge of nightlife lies in that temporary freedom and brief construction of a parallel social space in which different rules apply, and people less efficient, less productive, less obedient.

It still exists, though under pressure and further to the edges. Haller does not treat it as a lost world.

"There will always be an underground rave culture.”

· Mischa Haller / Not Done Yet

It might move further out. It might have to push harder against policing, pricing, apps, branding, luxury flats, council complaints and licensing grief. But it remains, because people will always need some space, however temporary, in which to step outside the managed version of themselves.

That is what Haller's photographs leave behind. Not nostalgia, not quite, though there is some ache in them. More the sense that the most revealing moments begin once the night stops presenting itself and starts to show what it has done.

Not Done Yet is out now via In Between Press

• COLD
• DRINKS
• GRILLED CHEESE
• VAPE
• TOBACCO

• ZTP
• In Conversation / Mischa Haller
• PEEP SH
• PEE SHO

Mischa Haller / Wasted In Warsaw

Peace and Purpose keeps everything close to the source. Recorded in a Calgary basement with a single SM57, it pushes voice, percussion and room sound into the same close, brittle space. Speaking with Zach Choy and Aleem Khan, Crack Cloud trace the record back to first conditions family, migration, labour, memory, survival. As ever, the collective resists fixed definition.

On Peace and Purpose, that openness is less method than a way of existing.

The title Peace and Purpose suggests aspiration rather than arrival. Was the record conceived around the idea that meaning is something you move through rather than finally resolve?

Zach: Yeah, I think that's quite astute. I think it's exactly that. It's a trajectory. It remains incomplete.

Aleem: It's constantly in flux. I mean, the only experience you have is life, because we can't define the next chapter. So while we're here, we do have to struggle and suffer, and there is peace, really, in everything. That's all I can say.

You recorded the entire album with a single SM57, which collapses voices, drums and the room itself into the same physical space. Were you trying to capture a moment unfolding in real time, rather than build a more controlled studio record?

Zach: I think a little of it was practical. We'd just finished a record for a larger label before Peace and Purpose, and we did the full studio experience. We travelled around to record it, and it was cumbersome, though it was also quite magnificent and exciting in some way.

Then, coming back home to a Calgary winter, back down to earth, I'm not sure there was any grand intentionality behind making another Crack Cloud record. It was more about settling into my home and the neighbourhood, having this modest space in the basement, and inevitably starting work on something. That led to a sort of recording bender that lasted a few months.

It didn't feel like we needed to embellish anything further with resources that weren't already at hand. That became the precedent for everything: let's work within our means, like we used to when we were 15 years old in the garage.

Peace and Purpose

Crack Cloud

• PEACE
• AND PURPOSE
• བྱས བསུབཤསས་བན་པ་ངན་

"You can have goals and aspirations, you can put energy into those aspirations, but you're also part of a larger ecosystem, culturally and otherwise."

-Zach Choy

Crack Cloud has never felt like a traditional band so much as an evolving collective of people moving through the same creative orbit. How do you hold on to a sense of identity when the project itself is so open and fluid?

Zach: I'm not sure it's something that we maintain or specifically control so much as surrender to these fluctuations that you talk about. For better or worse, we've experienced so many transitions, aesthetically and interpersonally, and that's never really by design. It's more fate, choices, external circumstances things that direct a group in a way that isn't contrived.

It's fluid by design. It's just like your life or anyone else's life. You can have goals and aspirations, and you can put energy into those aspirations, but you're also part of a larger ecosystem, culturally and otherwise. There are things you can't predict. I think sometimes it's about reconciling yourself to the unpredictability of life and letting that steer you in the right direction. Especially in the context of art, having that kind of relationship with spontaneity, with that which you can't control, is intrinsic to Crack Cloud.

Aleem: Yeah, absolutely. It's like rock 'n' roll, it's always been smoke and mirrors. And when life hits, it hits you pretty fucking hard. You either bear that cross or you perish under it all and come back maybe with a different purpose the next time. But exactly as Zach was saying, it's more utility than aesthetic choice, and it always has been since day one. Period.

Peace and Purpose / Crack Cloud

How did the two of you first meet?

Aleem: Cutting our teeth in the Calgary local music scene. Playing bars, playing shows. When you're immersed in something larger in your own city - a kind of localised thing you end up crossing paths.

Zach: think outside music too, we somehow just gravitated towards each other, as with a lot of people who've been in and out of Crack Cloud. Calgary is a small town, and if you are eccentric in any way, it's usually the case that you'll bump into each other. That was definitely the case for Aleem and me.

Who or what shaped you in those formative years, when you first started picking up instruments?

Zach: For me, probably just punk. I grew up with Neil Young and The Beatles and Sarah McLachlan and Sade and Blue Rodeo a lot of folk music. But as far as punk rock goes: Rancid, Minor Threat, the usual suspects for a disenfranchised youth. It was this thing that made me feel like I wasn't alone.

Aleem: Brian Eno was swirling around a lot. Early U2, Clash, Mark Knopfler, Dire Straits, Zappa, King Crimson, Robert Fripp. I had friends who introduced me to all types of music stuff on the radio, Indian music, Arabic music, Canadian indie, Broken Social Scene, all of that stuff we loved. My eldest brother was a huge hipster, so by default. But I wouldn't know what I know without Zach. I wouldn't be the type of person I am today if we hadn't shared musical influences together, if we hadn't got together and had discussions about anything or anyone. So I'm just grateful to experience music as a whole and be involved in it in some capacity.

AND Both of you come from families shaped by non- Western cultural traditions. When you were younger and finding yourselves through music, did you feel you had to prove yourselves that little bit more?

Zach: I think I was probably misunderstood in the way the next person with a similar family dynamic might be. Certainly misunderstood, but my family's always been really supportive. I sort of fell into music.

Honestly, the real catalyst for me getting into music had more to do with late-stage sobriety more than anything, that was the thing that pushed me into writing songs through intuition.

I don't really have a musical background, so it wasn't like, 'Hey uncle, I know you want me to be a doctor, but I'm choosing music.' It wasn't like that. It was more that I was already off-grid, struggling with addiction, and when I got sober I needed something. I needed an outlet.

I played with all sorts of different mediums, and music was one of many, but it just started taking up more and more of my energy. The next thing we all knew, we were travelling the world and sharing songs, and it just perpetuated itself for the better part of a decade.

So it wasn't so much a conflict over whether I should stay in school or start a band. The conflict was deeper than that. By the time I got into music, it was actually a relief for my family. They could see it provided an anchoring point for me.

Peace and Purpose / Crack Cloud

Aleem: Growing up in a Pakistani household, my mum had been raised by a single mother in a village, bringing up three kids after their dad left in 1950. I was born in the States while my dad was there on a student visa from Pakistan. By then they already had four kids, so there were all these little babies, and my mum was working her arse off at a Coca-Cola factory, in plastic plants, cutting hair supporting the family while my dad was going to school.

My family is just fundamentally super-Pakistani, you know? And me being the little black sheep - I'm the youngest of five — I got handed down the game from everyone, and I was like, 'I'm not gonna do that, I'm not gonna do that, I am gonna do that.'

My first instrument was drums, and then, because they were too loud, I got a guitar. And they were like, 'Yeah, you are going to be a doctor. You are going to be employed. You are going to make money.' A lot of Asians can relate to that. There are these goals way out in front of us that we're just banging our heads against the wall trying to achieve.

But there's another side to music peace, fulfilment, creativity, not being a bad kid, staying inside and doing something different. My parents could see it was good for me, especially with the history of all the siblings.

I've always been involved in music. I played every talent show in primary school. I taught myself guitar. Zach and I don't have a formal musical background. I'm self-taught on every instrument I play, and that's why he and I related on a more spiritual level. It can get very convoluted, especially for young people naive to the reality of the industry and its false hopes. But when you relate to music on a spiritual level, it eliminates the need for capital.

Zach: There's such a beautiful pragmatism embedded in the first-generation immigrant family dynamic, and I think that gets complicated when you become the first one to deviate from that path of: 'Listen, we need to work seven days a week, we need to lay low, and a couple of generations from now there'll be space to breathe a little more.'

There is that consciousness when you go into art and music. I look at the elders in my family and the sacrifice they made and continue to make - and I'm so impressed. As I get older, I admire more and more the amount of work that went into establishing a foundation for us here in Canada. It shapes how I think about everything.

When you're young, and we go back to punk music, it can feel like the antithesis of all that. But from an immigrant point of view, it's remarkable the will, the resolve, the bravery required to go somewhere foreign and carve out a life for generations to come. It deserves reverence and respect. It's on my mind all the time.

I'm an electrician, and I come from a family of electricians. So as I get older, I value that more than I did when I was younger. And as they've got older, they've eased up on their expectations of me. They see the real value in the art we make, and they've made a real effort to understand where we're coming from and how our experience is different from theirs.

It's strange for parents who didn't fully know the old country, then to watch their kids grow up in a completely foreign environment and engage with things they themselves are still figuring out. I think about it all the time.

Red Mile opened out into vast terrain and almost mythic imagery, whereas Peace and Purpose feels compressed, basement acoustics, tighter arrangements, a much more intimate sonic space. What did that stripping away of spectacle reveal about the core of the music?

Zach: I imagine it creates a different experience for the listener, or at least a different relationship to Crack Cloud. For me, when we're working on an album, it's not like we have a book of tricks or rules we need to abide by, or a fixed set of ingredients. It's a clean slate every time. I could honestly say that about every record we've done.

It's very compulsive, and it's kind of a different genre every time different genres dictated by where we are in life. The sound you're hearing is really just a natural consequence of our surroundings, rather than us referring back to previous work and thinking about how we can augment it. It's very disconnected, very disjointed. Honestly, we weren't sure if Peace and Purpose was a Crack Cloud record. We weren't sure Red Mile was a Crack Cloud record either.

I don't even know what Crack Cloud is.

What would you want Crack Cloud to be?

Zach: I think what I've learned is that it becomes a fickle thing when you try to put a label on it. That was probably a fallacy in the beginning, 'this is our ideology, this is where we come from, this is what we represent'. As you move forward through your time on Earth, things develop more nuance. It's about adapting to those nuances and not getting pigeonholed, while still having a firm understanding of what you believe in.

When it comes to art, though, I think it should be a space for ambiguity, a space to experiment a little more and not get bogged down by labels. Labels are important, and I think having a sense of direction and definition matters in life generally. But with Crack Cloud, not putting a specific label on it has been vital from the very beginning.

Aleem: I think that also relates to gratitude, being present with what you actually have in front of you, not just chasing what you're trying to have. That goes back to family as well. You don't get to choose it, but it's the single most important thing to you.

Zach: My dad always used to quote: 'You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you get what you need.'

The 'Safe Room' video stitches together fragments from different eras of Crack Cloud's life so that past and present begin to fold into one another. Do you think of memory as archival, or more as a loop that keeps intruding on the present and shaping identity as you go?

Zach: For me, it's the latter, and sometimes I wish it didn't have such an impact on the present. I think that's probably a relatable feeling. Of course, inspiration is found in memory, but sometimes memory also impairs your ability to move forward.

In a lot of ways, art is a constant dialogue with the past a constant attempt to revisit and understand experience. So what you said is very true. Memory is powerful, but it's also deceptive. The integrity of memory, the relationship between memory and truth, that's really interesting to me.

A lot of Crack Cloud is based on true shit, but it's also about adapting, embellishing, creating fantasy out of lived experience. Experience and memory are inseparable.

Peace and Purpose / Crack Cloud

"We just felt more connected to the spirit than to the machine."

Aleem Khan

The album allows things to remain unstable: drums distort, vocals strain, instruments bleed into one another. Do you hear that abrasion as an aesthetic choice, or as a more honest documentation of the moment the music was made?

Zach: I think both. It was a beautiful experience working with a label, doing the studio thing, having maximum resources. But it felt a bit like imposter syndrome for us, and there was something really cathartic about stepping back into the past, so to speak, and returning to the old dusty drum kit that had been in storage, relying completely on ourselves for everything from engineering to mixing.

We've always had our hands in everything, but there was something radical about protecting ourselves from external influence and trusting that this was the most therapeutic thing we could do in that moment. It was intrinsic to the songs and the conditions in which they were born.

Aleem: Yeah, it was a practice of spontaneity. I'd take the bus in minus-30 winter weather with my guitar and a bass on my back to Zach's place, then walk over from the station. Realistically, it was just trying to capture lightning in a bottle-putting down exactly how we were feeling in that moment.

Everybody is complex, so we're always going through everything at once. For me, it really was just a way to continue finding a purpose on this earth at that point. When you're making art, you're so immersed in it that everything external is almost blocked out. You enter some kind of tunnel vision.

No label telling you to sell X amount. No things being waved in your face. That's just how the business is set up, so no knock to that. We just felt more connected to the spirit than to the machine, if that makes sense.

You've described Crack Cloud as a way of communicating philosophically, but much of the music relies on repetition and fragmented speech rather than a clear narrative. Are you interested in the point where language starts to break down and music takes over the work of meaning?

Zach: Yeah, I certainly feel we've tapped into that dimension in our music. I agree that there was a certain militancy to the earlier recordings we made, but I feel we've really let our guard down in recent years and found a lot of confidence in musicality as a successor to relying on rigid lyricism and all the rest of it.

At the end of the day, we're a bunch of mutts from a small town in Canada. When we go to London and find ourselves in the presence of all these conservatoire musicians, it's incredible to see. When you leave your pond and go out into the world, you realise the ceiling of talent is endless. I think we come from a different place, and maybe some people find novelty in that. I'd like to believe it's no less musical.

Aleem: I really respect the camaraderie those musicians have. We can still have a dialogue, we can still have a rapport, we can still find commonality. The spirit is the same, you know? The look is a little different, but the spirit's there.

Words: Ria Serena

DEAR

FORGET ABOUT IT

ALL. DISTRACT YOURSELF WITH WORK TRY TO FILL: THE VOIDWITH EMPTY ACHIEVEMENTS, IT WON'T MAKE ANY DIFFERENCE.YOU WON'T FEEL BETTER. KEEP GOING AROUND INCIRCLES GIVE IN TO THE CYCLE

NOTHING CHANGES.IT NEVER DOES. IS THIS AN ACT OF PUNISHMENT OR SACRIFICE? WHICH DO YOU DESERVE? REMEMBER-YOU DI THIS TO YOURSELF

Artwork Imarni Boyer-Nugent

DEAR

FORGET ABOUT IT ALL. DISTRACT YOURSELF WITH WORK TRY TO FILL THE VOID WITH EMPTY ACHIEVEMENTS*, IT WON'T MAKE ANY DIFFERENCE. YOU WON'T FEEL BETTER. KEEP GOING AROUND INCIRCLES.GIVE IN TO THE CYCLE. NOTHING CHANGES.IT NEVER DOES. IS THIS AN ACT OF PUNISHMENT OR SACRIFICE? WHICH DO YOU DESERVE?

• REMEMBER YOU DID THIS TO YOURSELF.
• REPEAT
• ABANDON ALL ART
• PRODACT
• LOVE NOTHING
• BECOME DISSATISFIED WITH WORK.
• CUNTSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM
• ANNIHILATION
• ALL PAINTERS
• HOTDOG EATING CHAMP
• REPEAT
• ABANDON
• ROBOTS FUCK ME
• ALL ART
• CENTRE
• A PRODUCTIVITY AS PUNISHMENT
• PERFORMANCE ART IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED
• NO SOUTHERNERS
• WALLOW
• DESIGNERS
• IN SELF-PITY
• PLAGIARISTS WILL BE EXECUTED
• MARTYR FOR HIRE
• UNEMPLOYABLE
• QUESTION
• PURPOSE
• YOUR
• DEATH TO WILL
• ART
• YOUR TEXT
• SUCKS
• DRAW

FOR HERE

I LOVE WASTING TIME AND MONEY. I LOVE REJECTION. I LOVE THE ENDLESS CYCLE BUT MOST OF ALL, I LOVE ATTENTION

• WASTING
• RD MONEY
• REJECNON
• DE BUT MOST S
• LOVE THE ENDLE
• LOVENENON
• E ARE UNABLE TO PROVIDE FE

BUVE HAD TO FEATURE SORR ANOTHER CAN

UNATELY DECIDED T SORRY SORRY BUT YOU

• ME APPRECIATE
• BUT
• EOPLE
• ORAY
• WE'RE L
• MAKE
• BEG FOR VENESS WILL
• TO BE SORRY.
• TOP UNT ANT
• ROLE MODEL
• PRE

FORCE MEANING ONTO MY WORK. WE NOT EXPLAIN ANYTHING TO ANYONE.

WILL RIOT TELL THE TRUTH UNLESS THERE'S

• SOMETHING
• FOR ME
• Artwork Imarni Boyer-Nugent

Manchester has long thrived as a space built from friction, the abrasion between noise and understated beauty. In that space, Manchester trio Shaking Hand - brothers George Hunter (vocals/guitar) and Freddie Hunter (drums), alongside bassist Ellis Hodgkiss have carved out something quiet yet distinct.

Their debut album lends itself to the kind of slow, melodic listening that fosters a unique sense of immersion. It's a record that rolls along gently, almost patiently, yet beneath its steady pulse there is something more caustic. Flurries of tension cut clean through the haze, giving the songs an emotional weight. The result is music that burrows into the conscience, laidback yet acutely aware of its impact all the same.

Shaking Hand have forged their path the old-fashioned way. At the core of their sound is a catalogue of long-form songs laid bare, free from the feeling of over- polished overexposure.

It was their steadily built reputation through live shows which caught the attention of their label, Melodic Records.

"Their initial interest in us was purely based on live performances, which just inspired confidence in us straight away. It didn't really feel like that was a thing any more, especially for a band with seven-minute songs and, at the time, no real social media presence. They were just really excited to work with us.

In our first chat they said they saw the band as an album band, and once that opportunity was presented to us it was a no-brainer, really. In terms of involvement, they were instrumental in getting us to work with David Pye through a recommendation from James Rutledge, whose musical project Pedro was Melodic's first release back in 1999. Everything was discussed together, from the mixes to the track listing. Dylan from the label, and now our manager, was heavily involved in the artwork side of things and the layout.'

In Conversation / Shaking Hand sha

There is undeniably a strong visual quality running through the record. With songs defined by restraint and negative space, there is something open, airy and architectural in both melody and image. Gentle guitars trace fine lines across weightier foundations, filling the space with a sense of intention.

Though not consciously conceived in such a way, the album feels carefully constructed, built up through repetition and tension. This sensibility extends beyond the music itself. The accompanying artwork echoes the same attentiveness to precision and perspective. The connection between sound and image, much like the band's writing process, surfaced organically.

"Ellis' partner is an architect and she has a coffee- table book called Never Built Los Angeles by Greg Golding and Sam Lubell, and the idea of an unrealised space for hypothetical people seemed to really resonate with the mood of the music.

We scanned a few images and ultimately settled on the artwork we've got by an American architect called Ray Kappe. We reached out to his family and his son was kind enough to share some more of his designs, which we used for the "Mantras" and "Over the Coals" single covers. I guess our music sort of resembles this architectural drawing as well. There's a lot of fine lines, intricacies and negative space. We see our songs as constructions."

The idea of unrealised space feels central to their music. Shaking Hand's pieces seem to build emotional frameworks for the listener to step into. Although the meticulously stitched-together final form of each song might suggest otherwise, there is a marked openness to their writing process, underscored by the freedom to experiment.

"When we write music it's mostly based on instinct, trust and telepathy. George and Fred are brothers and have been playing music together for years. We don't think about a narrative during the process, and meaning and interpretation start to take shape once the song is written. Lyrically, it's mostly a stream of consciousness and random phrases stitched together, taken from trying to decipher phone recordings of us playing. Perhaps subconsciously these are written as a product of the environment we're in, which results in a theme of sorts."

In Conversation /

The landscape from which the band have spread their roots feels intrinsic to the way they have created their sound. Elements of their output seem drawn from the city that surrounds them. Manchester has long maintained an undercurrent fertile for the growth of emerging artists.

"Manchester always feels like a small big city. There's a lot of space, but a lot of familiar faces, and there's a lot of collaboration, particularly since Covid. In terms of how the community shapes the way we work, I don't know how much it does. I'd say part of what makes the scene so good in Manchester at the moment is how distinct the bands are. There's not really anyone trying to imitate anyone else. More than anything, seeing the success of different projects coming from the city is inspiring. It makes you feel like there's a way to break through without having to move to London."

That balance between community and individuality has undoubtedly fed the sense of momentum within the band's arrangements. Whilst many of their songs feel patient and meditative, their presence is never static. Hinged on moments of dynamic shift, the careful contrast between tension and release reveals something playful running through their sound.

"We like having fun while jamming. Sometimes we come up with silly ideas, like the big hits halfway through "Cable Ties", then realise they actually sound quite good, so end up sticking with them. We've realised experimenting with tension and release really works well in a live setting. You can hear audiences audibly reacting to it sometimes, which is great."

Shaking Hand

Across the album there is a recurrent friction that sustains the tipping point between peace and collapse. The shifts feel controlled and deliberate, yet for the band it is simply an atmosphere built out of what feels comfortable.

"I think it's just a musical dynamic that we're drawn to. We're not really chaotic dudes, especially me, Fred. For me, this just comes through jamming. I must admit I like to switch things up a lot in jams and can sometimes get bored of repeating sections. That helps with the switches between control and chaos. We listen to a wide range of music, which I guess might have given us more of an understanding of control and chaos, from softer bands like Big Thief to the opposite end of the spectrum with Mandy, Indiana."

Their sound often feels reminiscent of Pavement, Women and Sonic Youth in its laidback, lo-fi grittiness. Listeners have also drawn comparisons with bands like Ulrika Spacek, Duster and Autolux, not just sonically but in terms of pacing and texture. The band agree those references are not far off.

"Yes, I'd say those references are pretty spot on. Ulrika have always been a big inspiration, from their production to their melodies especially, so some of this would have crept into the record. We're fans of Duster, but I guess they're a bit more lo-fi. We've tried to keep this record a bit cleaner-sounding. The aim of the record was to capture our live sound but add on sprinkles of what we called fairy dust in terms of production. Clean, driven guitars and loud reverb-y guitars. A lot of 90s and early-2000s bands were useful as references for this, Unwound and Shipping News for example."

In Conversation / Shaking Hand

"I think meaning is created by the receiver rather than the sender."

The slow builds and sudden ruptures that anchor the album invoke a wavering unease. "Up the Ante (Lope)", for example, might strike the listener as relatively lighter and more hopeful, yet a certain grittiness remains at its core. It would be tempting to assume that such emotional shifts are a deliberate attempt to challenge the listener. However, Shaking Hand make clear that intuition is the real driving force.

"We lean into these ideas a lot because it's fun for us to play. We don't really think about the listener when we're writing. I think moments of unease or disorientation emerge naturally. We listen to a lot of bands who experiment with this, so we try to tap into it, but we're also suckers for a good melody, so this gets thrown into the mix as well."

On first listen there is a lingering sense that something is being held back by this balance between subtlety and abrasion. Yet, in the band's own telling, that quality is never calculated.

"I don't think it's a deliberate thing. We write the music quite instinctively through improvisation in rehearsals and then it's usually about decoding and refining those improvisations. Even George's lyrics are quite often improvised in the room at the time and then expanded from there. I like the fact listeners are projecting their own meanings on to the songs, though, and I think meaning is created by the receiver rather than the sender. It's been cool seeing people reflecting on it in different ways."

In creating that space for interpretation, their process is less bound by formula than by a careful collective attention to detail.

"Normally it's an idea like a riff that someone's worked on at home and we'll jam on it for a while, and this is where the general atmosphere is created. We're confident in our abilities to come up with things like riffs and individual parts, and the jams help explore them a bit more and work out which avenue to take them down. Once we're getting closer to what we think is going to be the final arrangement or structure, then we consider other elements like textures. We've started playing around with drum loops and samples a little more, so maybe they'll feature on future music."

The record often feels like winding passages layered into an unconventional form. Again, their technique is less bound by design than one might at first presume. The key to the band's method seems to be sitting back and allowing each other to shine through. There remains an intrinsic trust and sense of intuition, which allows trial and error to dictate a song's final form more than careful mapping.

"When jamming, we sometimes might be running through a verse idea and then jump into something completely new, which, if we're recording on a phone, might end up as the next section. Some songs come about from us liking two or three different ideas and trying our best to make them fit together as one song, "Cable Ties" for example. I think George is really good at repeating earlier sections later on in the song, but giving them a lift. The repeated verse in "Italics" springs to mind for this.

Once we've explored different avenues the song can go down structurally, and we normally end up going back to the first version, then the lyrics start taking a bit more shape. We try to get new songs into our live set to keep things fresh for us, but also to get a bit of feedback, externally and internally, as sometimes you can tell if it's not quite the finished article yet."

When it came to recording with David Pye, there was never any intention to radically reinvent their sound at source. The desired outcome was, rather, to capture as faithfully as possible the rawness of their live energy.

In Conversation

"The songs were already there, so David's main role was cultivating the most comfortable environment for us to play in and capturing our live sound whilst adding that little bit of what we called fairy dust. There weren't any real sonic tweaks or anything added in post-production. He brought a couple of guitar pedals along just to try out some different tones, but he let us play the songs the way we knew how to. We had a demo album recorded beforehand, which we did ourselves, and he was keen to use elements of those recordings, like the double-tracked vocals and overdubbed drum parts."

"With the album carrying years of work in its shadows, it is unsurprising that it contains a certain weight. Even so, finishing the project seems to have brought the band a sense of freedom and detachment.

"Upon receiving the final mixes and masters of the album, it felt like a timestamp of five years' work and it was easy to forget about it and start moving on to the next thing. Since the album has come out, it's been given a new lease of life mainly through people's reactions to it. It's easy to forget that something we're so used to is completely new to others. So we're still looking forward, but we're looking to build upon what we've already achieved."

Foundations now firmly in place, Shaking Hand stand on the edge of something bold and expansive.

Words: Alice Beard

Shaking Hand

Editor & Design

Kieran T. Poole words

Kieran T. Poole Pages: 04, 24, 25

Ria Serena Pages: 07, 08

Lee Ranaldo Pages: 07, 08 09, 10, 11

Ulrika Spacek Pages: 16, 17 18, 19

Mischa Haller

Pages: 25, 26, 27

Crack Cloud Pages: 30, 31 32, 33, 34

Alice Beard Pages: 38, 40

Shaking Hand Pages: 38, 39 40, 41, 42

• Images & Artwork
• Mischa Haller
• Pages: 01, 22, 23, 24
• Anna Bogaciovas
• Pages: 03, 06, 07, 11, 12
• Hallwalls Archive
• Pages: 08, 09
• Robert Banach
• Page: 10

Anya Broido Pages: 14, 15, Crack Cloud

• Pages: 32, 33, 34
• Sam Lindley
• Pages: 38, 39, 40, 41
• Piran Aston
• Page: 42
• Phillip Formby
• Pages: 44, 45
• Kieran T. Poole

Pages: 02, 05, 35, 43, 44, 45

• Steph Dutton
• Pages: 20, 21
• Imrani Boyer-Nugent Pages: 36, 37

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KICKSPEED DONTFOLLOW SHOOTTHELIGHT FROMTOMORROW may '26 sprawlmagazine.co.uk