Arts

Sprawl Magazine / Issue 3

Sprawl #3 176 x 246 mm, 48 pages Sprawl is a new Nottingham-based indie mag dedicated to DIY subcultures, music and art. Available both online and in print, and taking inspiration from the scrappy punk fanzines of the late 70s and early 80s, inside you’ll primarily find conversations with scenesters old and new. After hours photographer Mischa Haller sets the tone of this third issue, which features a shot from his recently published photobook ‘Not Going Home’—an ode to 90s club culture—on the cover. Inside, he reflects on his early career, the evolution of the dance floor following seismic shocks such as the collapse of communism and 9/11, as well as what remains once the lights go up. Also featured: Sonic Youth guitarist and vocalist Lee Ranaldo, English rock band Ulrika Spacek, graphic artists Steph Dutton and Imarni Boyer-Nugent, Canadian collective Crack Cloud, and more. Words: MagCulture

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Published: May 20, 2026
Pages: 48

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Sprawl music art culture00 MAGAZINE
YOU MAKEYOU BUY YOU DIE
(Contents)ISSUE 3 04 THE SPRAWL
Page 404 THE SPRAWL
HONESTY Bathing SuitsDJ's Department For Dance Sprawl Collective the carousel nottingham 06.06.26 sprawl tickets:
Page 62 leeranaldo
Page 7In 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.
Page 808 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?
Page 9"Seeing those audience reactions made us realise that what felt normal inside New York was, elsewhere, genuinely radical. In Conversation / Lee Ranaldo
Page 1010 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?
Page 11You'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.
Page 1212 SONIC YOUTH
HE SPRAWLWRITE FOR 13
Page 1414 ulrika
Page 15cek Ulrika Spacek / EXPO
Page 1653.11 36.77
Page 17Was 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.
Page 1818 Compared to earlier records, did EXPO feel like a rupture or a refinement, and was that shift intentional, or only obvious in hindsight?
Page 19At 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.
AND YOUAND >YOU 20
Artwork Steph Dutton21
Page 2222 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.
The Guardian's economics editorELLIOTT 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
Page 2424 In Conversation / Mischa Haller
Mischa Haller / Not Going Home25
Page 2626 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.
Page 27That 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."
Page 2828 ZTP
Page 29OW P W
CRACK CLOUD30 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.
Page 31PEACE AND PURPOSE
Page 3232 "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."
PEACE URPOSAND 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.
Page 3434 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?
Peace and Purpose / Crack Cloud36
Page 36DEAR FORGET ABOUT IT
RECOME DISSATISFIED WITH WORKDEAR 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?
Page 3838 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.
king an In Conversation / Shaking Hand39
Page 4040 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.
Page 41Across 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."
Page 4242 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.
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CONTRIBUTORSEditor & Design Kieran T. Poole words
sprawl әгебеш@SPRAWLMAGAZINE SPRAWLMAGAZINE.CO.UK
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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.