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Saint Clair - Train
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KWAYE - Cool Kids
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/ @Banfimusic - Rosedale House
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Monster Movie - Keep the Voices Distant
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// Letters to YVYNYL //
premiere: SUNKEN - Recompose
/ I hated it when people told me I was “too young” to do things in life. This sibling duo - Finn Billingham and sister Poppy Billingham - is working hard to respond to that challenge in their nascent music career. You’ve got to get to the later half of this song to really get its gravitas. At about 2:50, the song breaks apart into a hot, melting downbeat that you’d wish went on into the next track. Hello, DJs (hint, hint)!
Hi Mark,
Thanks for giving us a place to talk about the song and the reasons we are so happy to be making and writing music at the moment. Me and my sister begun writing songs together last summer, predominantly inspired by the music being made around us. The part of London we live in has loads of great artists coming out of it that pushes you to find a sound that captures the uneasiness of being young in a city like London.
Going through this process with my 17 year old sister has added another dimension to this unease, with the struggles of a young female singer being so apparent, as her influences are not being heard and some people miss the nuance of what she is trying to craft. People are eager to group us in with pop acts where young women trying their hand is maybe more familiar and less threatening for some of the musicians who are trying to do a similar thing.
In the end we feel this comes out in the moody tone of the song, which living in London has helped to facilitate. Primarily due to its community of artists with similar ideas and sounds, like Babeheaven, King Krule and Jerkcurb, who definitely inspired us to find our own identity. On top of this, growing up in the same household, where we were exposed to a range of music, from Nina Simone & James Brown to Groove Armada and the Gotan Project, has made it much easier to find a coherent sound as we both draw on similar influences.
The last piece of the puzzle was finding the right people to help bring these songs to life, which our band mates have definitely done. Elliott Higgs, who plays keyboards in our shows pointed us towards what is going on at the moment, showing us bands like Cellar Door who have such a good sound. Finn Boxer, who’s put his own take on the song and our music, helped lock the song to a groove which differentiates us from lots of what’s going on.
We hope to show this all this with our latest track. Creating something unique, that still captures the feeling of the community, is essentially what we are trying to do. We want to keep the songs sounding raw/authentic and make sure we retain the passion we have for this now for a while longer. At the moment we’re focused on getting our live sound polished, as we’ve put a lot of time into recording demos over the past couple of months. Getting to know other artists who want to create a similar experience has given us an even further taste and hopefully we will be back with something soon.
All the best,
Finn
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// Letters to YVYNYL //
Toby. - Hazy Sunday
/ Who doesn’t love hazy, lazy Sundays? This song should hit that spot just right. I like the story Toby Corton sent me about his friend that inspired him to start diving deeper into music. To learn the craft and to figure out what songwriting meant to his distant friendship.
Hi Mark,
My names Toby, and I’m a musician from London. I’ve just recently released a track called “Hazy Sunday,” it’s a snapshot of my university memories.
I recently (well I say recently but it was last July and it seems as if someone has press fast forward on life) graduated from University in Nottingham, England, the home of the legendary Robin Hood! It was four of the best years, made some lifelong friends and memories. It was also here that my I refund my passion for making and performing music, when I was coerced by a crazy guy, Abdulla from Bahrain, who I met on my course, to get back into singing and writing. He was and still is the biggest Jimi Hendrix fan I’ve ever met and I was quite taken back by his obsession with music. To be honest with you, when I first encountered him in one of my lectures I thought to myself “who the f**k is this guy?” and “why doesn’t he shut up?” He ended up being one of the greatest friends I’ve made, I took him to his first music festival!
When we spoke briefly, I let it slip that I sang and that I wrote music (although I hadn’t really done much of it for a few years) and then that was it, he pestered me until I gave in and had a jam with him. It was fun! It made me realise how much I missed all of the music stuff I did whilst at high school. I started to write more and more, we jammed more, we made recordings in his bedroom and played some gigs. We argued, well more disagreed, but we’d always make up. We come from very different places musically, geographically and demographically and the vision I had developed for the music I wanted to make differed from his sometimes.
We entered a competition to play Fred Perry’s Dot to Dot festival in Nottingham, we won and it spurred me on to continue music once I graduated from University. When I moved back to London sadly Abdulla had to go back to Bahrain. Lines on a piece of paper decide where we can call home, and there was no way he was getting a Visa to reside in the UK, for I hear they are bloody hard to come by. I continued writing, reflecting back upon my time in Nottingham, and so “Hazy Sunday” was born.
My flat (apartment if you’re American) was the cosy retreat after a long weekend of partying. Sunday would arrive and sprawled out in my 2 person flat would be all of my friends. We’d try not to leave the flat all day, smoking, watching Disney films or David Attenborough documentaries and eating food. If we ventured out it would be 2 minutes to the shop to maybe buy some cheap Prosecco (hair of the dog), and for a group of people who normally took pride in their appearance, we dressed liked slobs. “Hazy Sunday” is what is says on the tin I suppose, its a reminiscing of those Sundays spent with my friends.
I’m gonna be releasing more stuff soon and just made a DIY music video in my bedroom with my friend on my family’s old tape camcorder, so I look forward to sharing that with people. Getting back into music has also made me realise my enjoyment of creative pursuits!
So I suppose I owe a thanks to habibi Abdulla for reigniting the flame! It seems I’ve wrote an essay; didn’t realise I had that much to say HA!
All the best,
Toby
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Blaenavon - Orthodox Man
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// Letters to YVYNYL //
angelicaa - Nail Polish
/ Plenty of us don’t know what is the right point to start putting their project out there into the scary universe of the unknown. Maybe it truly is simple. Just jump.
Dear Mark,
I firstly want to thank you for giving unheard music, talent and voices a platform. It’s platforms such as this which reiterate the humanitarianism that will never be taken from the force that is music. No matter how corporations and money can sometimes seem to be at the centre of this industry, without heart there’s no music and so, no industry. Music will always be an art form in itself, but I think it’s clear from history and from how it can make us feel, that music is so much more than its form. In my opinion, the legacy, the emotion, the social change and reflection music provides, makes it the most powerful magic in this world.
I want to talk about my debut EP ‘& so…’ (came out on 11 Nov 2016) The title is a double entendre. ‘And…So!’ sounds like an introduction to something but also reads as, ‘And? So? Yet another new artist, why should I care?’, which in the context of this blog gives the irony I intended real weight. ‘Nail Polish’, the track you will find directly here, is the lead single. The video, which will be online very soon, was co-directed by my friend Rebecca Courtis, we studied Fine Art together at Central St Martins, and we shot the video in our studio. She made all the moving image visuals which we projected onto me live for each take. If I was to personify a song it would be ‘Nail Polish’, that emotional grit, the grunge. It’s just very me. I wrote it when I was 17, and now at 22 it has never felt better to play live. I’ve just graduated, I’m trying get my music off the ground, I’m at a crucial point in my life and there’s this fire in my belly which I can really tap into with this song. Sonically and lyrically there’s a kind of ugliness to it, a dissonance which makes it really cathartic to perform. I’ve got to thank my producer Christov Brilliant for that electronic eeriness on the track!
I wrote ‘Echoes’, another of the three tracks, when I was 16 years old; an angsty, insecure teenage girl with an obsession for music but too scared to sing. Writing ‘Echoes’ was a pivotal moment for me, it was the moment that I really knew my contribution to this world would be song-writing and that only I could be the one to sing my songs. It was the catalyst for a really crucial song-writing spell in my young life. Before this point I would labour with frustration to feel an ease and contentment with my craft. ‘Echoes’, a song about grieving the loss of my aunt just poured out of me with such fluidity and gave me a such feeling of fulfilment, empowerment and otherworldliness that I knew this truly was what I needed to do in my life.
Lady Gaga, who is a momentous figure and role model for me, while discussing her creative process said some of the most wonderfully vivid and vital bits of indirect advice that will never leave me: “honour your vomit”. She refers to that moment when something within you takes over, an urge to regurgitate all that you feel or want to play or sing or say. That’s the magic, that’s your talent working in your subconscious. Honour your creative vomit, let it spew and then craft it to the point of personal fulfilment. Not perfection, not satisfaction, but fulfilment.
These songs, such as that on the EP – ‘Echoes’, ‘Nail Polish’ & ‘When I Was Younger’, and many others still to be heard, have shaped my sound and set me up for what I now really need to express as a young woman with so much passion, anger and love for the world in which I exist. I am now at the stage where a seed is planted in the song-writing process, crystallising as a record and then becoming something other when I perform. I want to feel reborn on stage. Live performance is this new exciting element in my life and in my work that I finally feel ready to explore. My sociopolitical views have become vital to who I am as an artist and my personal struggles are now something I want to reclaim in order to empower not only myself but hopefully others. And this is now what feels so thrilling to be a musician, visual artist and filmmaker; these cross creative disciplines are now ready for an orgy. I have so much to say, so much to reveal and so much I want to achieve but this is just the start. It’s scary, it’s exciting, it’s unpredictable but bring it on!
While I am inextricably a music maker and artist putting something out into the world, it all starts with what you hear, what you see and what you absorb. I have met such incredibly talented, creative, open-minded friends and collaborators whilst at art school, who have quite frankly changed my life. In the space of two weeks I will have seen PJ Harvey, James Blake and Peaches perform live, all artists that I admire and aspire to emulate in different ways. In this mad, enigmatic 21st century we have such a calibre of music, film and artwork available literally in the palm of our hands. So I will conclude this ramble by echoing the sentiment of Lady Gaga’s phrase: honour your awe, honour your inspiration. As this is where the cyclical magic begins and where it ends…only to begin again.
All love,
angelicaa
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Heavy Heart - The Way Home
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PROM - I’ll Teach You
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Chelou - Halfway to Nowhere
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cruelrhythm:
if you realise.
