Recorded in caves, crypts, and shopping centres, Mandy, Indiana's debut album i've seen a way is everywhere at once: channeling the chaos that surrounds our everyday lives, their debut is an exquisitely rendered portrait that transcends genre into a expertly-executed vision that's entirely new and adventurous. A four-piece experimental noise band that formed out of the fertile Manchester scene, the group initially came to fruition after vocalist Valentine Caulfield and Scott Fair met sharing a bill with their former projects. Joined by Simon Catling (synth) and Alex MacDougall (drums), they have together generated a sound that is at once chaotic and precision engineered, where chance operations are manipulated into percussive geometries, and gnarled guitars sitin thickets of distortion around which vocals spin knots of lyrical repetitions.
Their first recordings emerged around 2019, with a smattering of early singles released not long after, culminating in 2021's critically acclaimed '...' EP which saw the band draw early cosigns including a remix from Daniel Avery and support slots from the Horrors, Squid, and Gilla Band. The latter's Daniel Fox mixed several of the tracks on debut album 'i've seen a way' alongside Robin Stewart (Giant Swan) and the album was mastered by Heba Kedry (Ryuichi Sakamoto, Bjork). Produced by the band's own Fair, they are like Thomas Bangalter locked in This Heat's Cold Storage fridge studio with Special Interest for a weekend, keeping their setup minimal for maximum effect. Buried found sound samples, sprawling percussive experiments are arranged via oblique references to film soundtrack strategies. "We take inspiration from films where the language of cinema is disrupted," explains Fair, who takes Julia Ducournau'snarrative detournements as a key influence.
"We want to alter textures, create clashes, and craft those momentswhen what you're expecting to happen never comes - by subverting expectations you keep an audience on its toes." Crucial to the album are effects wrought upon the sound by a clutch of unlikely off-site recording locations with novel acoustics, including screaming vocals emitted in a Bristol shopping mall and live drums recorded in a cave in theWest Country - the latter session interrupted by literal spelunkers.
Other sessions happened in Gothic crypts, where the band's physical bass frequencies and experiments with volume competed with underground roadworks and up seta yoga class above. i've seen a way is a manifesto for these moments of openness and disruption, with sessions in more controlled studio environments spliced with spontaneously captured lo-fi phone recordings, including a field of Swiss cows captured by McDougall while hiking: Fair elaborates that "these locations offered something acoustically, but would traditionally be thought of as having the 'wrong' characteristics for producing a 'good' recording. The sespaces imprint on the sound: It's not about a lack of access to more traditional recording spaces - it's about us capturing things happening in a specific place at that moment." Mandy, Indiana draw on the broad sonic palette of experimental noise music, from drum machine snaps to white noise; sprung synths and pulsing bass to lo-fi scuff.
The band's sound world is completed by Caulfield's lyrics that tel lof fury and fairytales. In 'Peach Fuzz' she sings: "It's not a revolt, it's a revolution," whereas '2 Stripe' is a subversivestory of castles and queens, woozy synths evoking 80s fantasy films like the Dark Crystal or Labyrinth. She sings inher native French, expressing frustration at the state of the world; talks of inequality; of everyday aggressions and grievances. She is restrained in 'Injury Detail', but delivers intense entreaties on 'Sensitivity Training'. "The themes of revolution and a need to stop the rise of fascism are very present in the lyrics," says Valentine, who counts video games like Dear Esther and dystopian sci-fi movies (such as Blade Runner 2049, Bioshock, and the anime film Perfect Blue) among the band's core influences. "I write for an audience that 99.9% of the time doesn't understand what I'm saying," she explains. "I use the sonorities of French; the natural poetics of the pronunciation to bring rhythm into the way I use words." A siren-like guitar sounds the alarm in the propulsive 'Drag [Crashed]'; 'Pinking Shears' is all rude swagger and rhythms that strut on metal legs; 'Injury Detail' alludes to the hard clacking cowbells of NY Noise but reimagined in a squat. 'Crystal Aura' is about finding beauty in our darkest and most vulnerable moments while'Iron Maiden' is a death march that stretches and serrates a languorous guitar motif, pairing it with agonised wailing ofa grieving mother. Elsewhere the album reaches towards the dancefloor or moves skyward: 'Peach Fuzz' scrapes club sounds from a beer-soaked floor, and 'Sensitivity Training' is a skeletal underground anthem, an open-endedclosing track. Theirs is music made from their place within the world, and is a sound that arrived fully-realized from their very firstsingles: "We have no agenda," says Fair. "The music is chaotic and we draw from every genre we can think of. Byour nature we are amorphous - this is often used pejoratively, but we consider it to be a wholly positive quality."
Though painstakingly crafted, where Mandy, Indiana thrives is the unexpected - and the resulting album sounds like nothing that has come before it.
Recorded in caves, crypts, and shopping centres, Mandy, Indiana's debut album i've seen a way is everywhere at once: channeling the chaos that surrounds our everyday lives, their debut is an exquisitely rendered portrait that transcends genre into a expertly-executed vision that's entirely new and adventurous. A four-piece experimental noise band that formed out of the fertile Manchester scene, the group initially came to fruition after vocalist Valentine Caulfield and Scott Fair met sharing a bill with their former projects. Joined by Simon Catling (synth) and Alex MacDougall (drums), they have together generated a sound that is at once chaotic and precision engineered, where chance operations are manipulated into percussive geometries, and gnarled guitars sitin thickets of distortion around which vocals spin knots of lyrical repetitions.
Their first recordings emerged around 2019, with a smattering of early singles released not long after, culminating in 2021's critically acclaimed '...' EP which saw the band draw early cosigns including a remix from Daniel Avery and support slots from the Horrors, Squid, and Gilla Band. The latter's Daniel Fox mixed several of the tracks on debut album 'i've seen a way' alongside Robin Stewart (Giant Swan) and the album was mastered by Heba Kedry (Ryuichi Sakamoto, Bjork). Produced by the band's own Fair, they are like Thomas Bangalter locked in This Heat's Cold Storage fridge studio with Special Interest for a weekend, keeping their setup minimal for maximum effect. Buried found sound samples, sprawling percussive experiments are arranged via oblique references to film soundtrack strategies. "We take inspiration from films where the language of cinema is disrupted," explains Fair, who takes Julia Ducournau'snarrative detournements as a key influence.
"We want to alter textures, create clashes, and craft those momentswhen what you're expecting to happen never comes - by subverting expectations you keep an audience on its toes." Crucial to the album are effects wrought upon the sound by a clutch of unlikely off-site recording locations with novel acoustics, including screaming vocals emitted in a Bristol shopping mall and live drums recorded in a cave in theWest Country - the latter session interrupted by literal spelunkers.
Other sessions happened in Gothic crypts, where the band's physical bass frequencies and experiments with volume competed with underground roadworks and up seta yoga class above. i've seen a way is a manifesto for these moments of openness and disruption, with sessions in more controlled studio environments spliced with spontaneously captured lo-fi phone recordings, including a field of Swiss cows captured by McDougall while hiking: Fair elaborates that "these locations offered something acoustically, but would traditionally be thought of as having the 'wrong' characteristics for producing a 'good' recording. The sespaces imprint on the sound: It's not about a lack of access to more traditional recording spaces - it's about us capturing things happening in a specific place at that moment." Mandy, Indiana draw on the broad sonic palette of experimental noise music, from drum machine snaps to white noise; sprung synths and pulsing bass to lo-fi scuff.
The band's sound world is completed by Caulfield's lyrics that tel lof fury and fairytales. In 'Peach Fuzz' she sings: "It's not a revolt, it's a revolution," whereas '2 Stripe' is a subversivestory of castles and queens, woozy synths evoking 80s fantasy films like the Dark Crystal or Labyrinth. She sings inher native French, expressing frustration at the state of the world; talks of inequality; of everyday aggressions and grievances. She is restrained in 'Injury Detail', but delivers intense entreaties on 'Sensitivity Training'. "The themes of revolution and a need to stop the rise of fascism are very present in the lyrics," says Valentine, who counts video games like Dear Esther and dystopian sci-fi movies (such as Blade Runner 2049, Bioshock, and the anime film Perfect Blue) among the band's core influences. "I write for an audience that 99.9% of the time doesn't understand what I'm saying," she explains. "I use the sonorities of French; the natural poetics of the pronunciation to bring rhythm into the way I use words." A siren-like guitar sounds the alarm in the propulsive 'Drag [Crashed]'; 'Pinking Shears' is all rude swagger and rhythms that strut on metal legs; 'Injury Detail' alludes to the hard clacking cowbells of NY Noise but reimagined in a squat. 'Crystal Aura' is about finding beauty in our darkest and most vulnerable moments while'Iron Maiden' is a death march that stretches and serrates a languorous guitar motif, pairing it with agonised wailing ofa grieving mother. Elsewhere the album reaches towards the dancefloor or moves skyward: 'Peach Fuzz' scrapes club sounds from a beer-soaked floor, and 'Sensitivity Training' is a skeletal underground anthem, an open-endedclosing track. Theirs is music made from their place within the world, and is a sound that arrived fully-realized from their very firstsingles: "We have no agenda," says Fair. "The music is chaotic and we draw from every genre we can think of. Byour nature we are amorphous - this is often used pejoratively, but we consider it to be a wholly positive quality."
Though painstakingly crafted, where Mandy, Indiana thrives is the unexpected - and the resulting album sounds like nothing that has come before it.
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