The God in Hackney | Interview | New Album, ‘The World in Air Quotes’
The God in Hackney recently released a largely genre-transcendent album, ‘The World in Air Quotes,’ out via Junior Aspirin Records. ‘The World In Air Quotes’ contains a whole continent of influences, fused and mangled.
The God in Hackney is comprised of core personnel: Andy Cooke, Dan Fox, Ashley Marlowe, Nathaniel Mellors. For ‘The World in Air Quotes,’ the group expanded their lineup to include guest American multi-instrumentalists and composers Eve Essex (Eve Essex & The Fabulous Truth, Das Audit, Peter Gordon & Love of Life Orchestra, Peter Zummo, Liturgy) and Kelly Pratt (Father John Misty, David Byrne/St Vincent, Beirut, and Lonnie Holley among many others). ‘The World In Air Quotes’ is The God In Hackney’s third album. It’s an album that resonates with the anxieties of the moment—feelings about climate change, isolation, extinction, the social impact of technology, the flattening of history—and it’s a record that tries to illuminate the darkness with laughter and surreal imagination. It is an album about life, death, ecology, and the sclerotic grip of a culture mired in quote, reference and deflated imagination; an ambitious attempt to climb out of the hole.
“Each album is a total commitment”
On April 28th you released your third album, ‘The World in Air Quotes’. How much work went into it in comparison with your previous two albums?
Nathaniel Mellors: We set about the new album having finished ‘Small Country Eclipse’ around 2020, and it emerged across two years of work since then. Each album is a total commitment with the resources we have available at the time. Our approach is organic: things grow, someone adds, someone subtracts, sometimes the process is fast and sometimes it’s slow. The first album, ‘Cave Moderne,’ took a few years, because we were making music periodically, without any sense of deadline really. A lot of it was fragmentary, recorded on Christmas visits to Andy Cooke’s studio in Hampshire, England—sessions done over a holiday weekend—but then at the end it came together in a very fast and focused way. Ashley, in that regard, is key: he did two days’ work on the drums and brought the album together in unimaginable ways. ‘Small Country Eclipse’ took about six years to make after that because, well frankly, once again we weren’t really making an effort to do another album until probably around 2018. But there are tracks on ‘Small Country Eclipse,’ such as ‘Crumble & Collapse,’ which were started about ten years beforehand. I feel that track has a great depth to it because of all the time it incorporated. Then, as with ‘Cave Moderne,’ when Ashley came into the studio and played, the process accelerated. Things got intensely focused, musically elevated, and finished very quickly.
Andy Cooke: I agree with Nathaniel, each album is a total commitment. Some tracks take years, some months, some might even be more or less complete within a few weeks.
Dan Fox: I think the answer to your question depends on how you define work. You’re thinking about what you’re doing when you’re washing the dishes, or out buying groceries. It’s bubbling away in your subconscious when you’re asleep. The work isn’t confined to the studio. Time spent away from it, letting ideas stew, chatting to each other, trying to get along as a group, that’s all part of the work. It’s impossible to quantify. ‘The World in Air Quotes’ began to grow during the pandemic, so we weren’t able to write and play together in the studio. Everything was done through file sharing, each of us working alone on writing and recording our individual parts in isolation, developing each other’s ideas, talking through the edits and mixes. The period of making ‘The World in Air Quotes’ was so strange and unsettling with everything that was happening in the world. I had phases of intense activity, and stretches when I didn’t do much on it all. I found myself taking a lot of long walks to think about the songs. I’d find it easier to estimate the number of miles I walked through New York during the making of the album than the hours I spent on it.
Would you like to talk a bit about your background? You are all coming from different bands and projects. Tell us what led you to form The God in Hackney?
Dan Fox: I met Nathaniel and Andy at art school in Oxford in the mid-1990s. The three of us were all making visual art back then, we didn’t play music together. Separate from this, Nathaniel and Ashley were close friends back in their home town of Tunbridge Wells, and they’d been making techno together under the name Conemelt since they were teenagers. Conemelt was working with the DJ and producer Andrew Weatherall of Sabres of Paradise/Two Lone Swordsmen/Primal Scream’s ‘Screamadelica,’ releasing music on his labels. We finished art school and moved to London in 1999, then Nathaniel introduced us to Ashley. I started a post-punk band called Skill 7 Stamina 12 with Nathaniel, Ashley and a Dutch artist, Maaike Schoorel, which led to us setting up our label, Junior Aspirin Records, in order to release the band’s music. Meanwhile, Andy had started a group called Socrates That Practices Music. Their one album, ‘BAT,’ is incredible and underrated. He and Nathaniel began The God in Hackney as a side-project. To me, watching them from the outside, it appeared very casual, just an occasional thing they’d do every few years, mostly during the Christmas holidays. I remember that their first release was a lathe-cut 8-inch triangular-shaped EP—almost impossible to play on a turntable—which featured a surreal spoken-word track about meeting Madonna outside a corner shop in a small English town. Eventually Skill 7 Stamina 12 split up, then Nathaniel, Ashley and myself made a one-off jazz-punk-electronic album under the name Advanced Sportswear, which we recorded in two days at the Rijksakademie art studios in Amsterdam, where Nathaniel was then living. (That was about 15 years ago now, and the album flew far under the radar, but bizarrely, a literature professor in Spain stumbled across it recently and referenced it in an academic journal, for an essay about jazz inspired by Cervantes’ ‘Don Quixote.’) I moved to New York and Nathaniel left Amsterdam for Los Angeles. We’d all occasionally meet up to do a bit of recording or to play a live show, initially with me and Ashley just helping out on The God in Hackney stuff. That arrangement gradually solidified and we became a quartet around the time of the first album.
Nathaniel Mellors: Technically speaking, The God in Hackney has existed for a while. It contains a lot of live and musical experience. But the periods of focused work have been relatively short and as a project it’s young and fresh.
What was it like for you the past two or three years? Our generation experienced so much stress during these difficult times with no ending in sight. Do you feel that your music reflects the surrounding?
Dan Fox: A degree of reflection is inevitable. But the most powerful music and art has an openness to it. We’re not a didactic band.We don’t sit down to write music about pressing issues. Personally, I’m allergic to artists who moralize at their audience, and I distrust artists who hide behind the tears of the world. That sort of work ends up being about the artist rather than the issue, more a demonstration of how good or courageous they are. There are overtly political songs that I find powerful—the anti-fascist song ‘Bella Ciao,’ for instance, or Robert Wyatt’s ‘Shipbuilding’—and they work because they contain vivid narrative imagery, which brings them alive in the minds of the listener. I mean, “diving for dear life, when we could be diving for pearls”—what a line. On ‘The World in Air Quotes,’ you’ve got the album opener, ‘In the Face of a New Science,’ which you might read as a song about eco-disaster or AI. But then there is also ‘Red Star,’ which is based on a dream that Nathaniel’s daughter had about Mars falling out of the sky and into her hand.The big and the domestic are inextricable. There’s a sense of dread on the new album, but it’s also quite funny in places too. Andy’s lyrics and vocals on ‘Philip’ really make me laugh, for some reason, but it’s based around quite an eerie set of sounds. Laughter, sadness, terror, boredom. Often these contradictory feelings are experienced at the same moment.
Nathaniel Mellors: Yeah I think it’s an attempt to materialize different emotional states. Sometimes it’s catharsis, sometimes it’s derived from the imagination, but even if a song or lyric is pulled from the imagination it’s still driven by emotion, which is always impacted by our environment. And what constitutes the environment is complicated… ‘In The Face of A New Science’, on one level it’s a kind of science-fiction, describing some form of post-catastrophic tribalism, with a sense that there’s been a bad scientific accident. But that fiction feels real because of what we’re all dealing with in the ecology, it’s underpinned by that real-life anxiety. On the other hand ‘In This Room’ is about the internet of loneliness, isolation and disconnection. ‘Broken Pets’ is a memory of a lysergically-fuelled teenage scene —distant but still resonant and present. Every song is different but has some kind of emotional propeller influenced by our surroundings.
Andy Cooke: I think that even if we try to, we cannot make music that does not reflect the context within which it is made. In my experience lyrical elements seem to have an uncanny way of revealing almost subconscious truths and realities, despite what a song might purport to be “about.”
Who all collaborated with you on the album? What was the recording and releasing process like for you?
Dan Fox: We were joined by Eve Essex and Kelly Pratt, both brilliant composers and musicians, both of whom had cameos on ‘Small Country Eclipse.’ Kelly is a versatile horn player and he’s extremely goodnot only at intuiting what we want, but writing parts we didn’t even know we wanted until we heard him play them. He lives in the US in North Carolina. We’ve never played in a studio with him, oddly enough. We usually send him a track, chat about roughly what we’re thinking—a mood, a texture—and he comes up with a few ideas. Once we land on something we all like, he then records his parts and sends back the finished takes. He works like Ashley does, unbelievably fast. Much of the song ‘Red Star’ on the new album is Eve’s work. She’s a highly adept improviser—sax, singer, flute, mostly—and has an ear for unusual harmony that we love. Separate to The God in Hackney, I’ve played in bands with Eve in New York for quite a few years now. The two of us had a clarinet, sax and electronics improv duo for a long time, and I also play bass in the group Das Audit with her, and as part of her solo backing band The Fabulous Truth. Playing with Eve has pushed me to up my game as a musician. I’ve learned a lot from her. Working with both Eve and Kelly has expanded our sense of what’s musically possible with The God in Hackney. One skill we picked up at art school was how to remain open to something unexpected happening during the writing process, rather than trying to control every aspect of it. I learned that from Ashley too. Making art is more exciting when you don’t know precisely what’s going to happen.
Andy Cooke: What Danny said.
Would you like to discuss your previous two albums and draw parallels with the upcoming release?
Andy Cooke: Not really.
Ashley Marlowe: My simple take is that ‘Cave Moderne’ was more primitive in its execution, ‘Small Country Eclipse’ feels more assured and mature perhaps due to gained experience, and now ‘The World in Air Quotes’ sits more quizzically in a place of international fear.
“Art and music are tools to change consciousness”
Are any of you involved in any other bands or do you have any active side-projects going on at this point?
Andy Cooke: The electro technical industry.
Dan Fox: I’m writing a novel. Every month I also co-write a sci-fi comedy and music show for NTS called Extra Extra Radio.
What are some future plans?
Dan Fox: We’d like to play in the same room as each other for a change.
Andy Cooke: …and play some live shows.
Let’s end this interview with some of your favourite albums. Have you found something new lately you would like to recommend to our readers?
Nathaniel Mellors: New music I’ve been really enjoying includes Billy Woods’ album ‘Aethiopes,’ Duval Timothy’s ‘Meeting With A Judas Tree,’ all of Little Simz records, ‘Lulanga Tales’ by Nyati Mayi & The Astral Synth Transmitters and ‘i pni’ by Kot Kot on Aguirre Records, which is like listening to Young Marble Giants—not literally, but essentially.
Dan Fox: I’ve been returning to John Cale’s ‘Paris 1919’ recently. Each song on that album is like its own miniature play, a bit like Scott Walker, whose music is rarely far from my turntable. In my writing I’ve been thinking a lot about the 1990s lately, so I’ve been enjoying listening to albums like Björk’s ‘Debut,’ to see what textures of the time the music can evoke. I’ve also been getting into the label Ankst who reissue a lot of alternative Welsh language music from the 1980s and ‘90s; ‘Singular 1994–1997’ by Ectogram, who sounded like early Stereolab but weirder and funnier, is a good one, and I quite like ‘Malltod’ (Blight) by Fllaps from 1990, crackpot hardcore reminiscent of the Butthole Surfers. Whenever Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs do a new compilation for Ace Records, I give it a listen; ’English Weather’ and ‘Paris in the Spring’ are big favourites in my home. I guess the past interests me a great deal. I should try and listen to something new for a change.
Andy Cooke: Ashley introduced us to the 1970 version of ‘The Witch’ by the Rattles, which is great. You should watch the video which is filmed mostly in woodland, presumably German. I have also recently revisited German Oak, a relatively obscure band from Dusseldorf, also active in the early 1970s.
Thank you. Last word is yours.
Nathaniel Mellors: Art and music are tools to change consciousness, and are owned by everybody despite the commercial structures that exist around certain versions. Make your own versions and believe.
Klemen Breznikar
Headline photo: Chris Bloor
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