Verity Susman is recalling the discussion she and Matthew Simms had about starting their new project, Memorials, explaining why and how they think the collaboration works. “When we were talking about working together, we thought, ‘We’ve got complementary skills.’” She pauses for a moment: “That sounds like working in an office, ‘complementary skills’!” Susman and Simms laugh at the aside. “But then you never know whether it’s going to work until you do it.”
While they’ve worked together before—Susman was a guest performer on Inside Your Guitar, the 2009 album by one of Simms’s groups, It Hugs Back, to choose just one example—the way Susman and Simms play together on Memorials’s debut LP, Memorial Waterslides, hints at the myriad possibilities that are still open to the duo. It’s partly to do with the sound they’re exploring: A kind of hypnotic, kaleidoscopic avant-pop that feels magicked out of the air, somewhere alongside Broadcast and Stereolab, but with its own defiant spirit. It’s certainly worlds away from what they might best be known for now: Susman’s time with Electrelane, Simms with Wire.
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
Their strengths are manifold and, as Simms suggests, Memorials ultimately comes down to what they’re able to achieve together and the ground they can cover as polymaths, a state that crosses over into their aesthetic interests, as well, as you can tell from their Big Ups choices. “Verity’s very much keyboard, piano, and singing,” Simms says, “I’m in the guitar, bass, and drums world. So in that sense of building things together, between the two of us, we can cover a lot.” They’re also enamored of the possibilities of reel-to-reel tape, which they use both when recording, and playing live—something that gives the songs an appealingly disembodied quality at times.
Memorial Waterslides picks up on the haunted and etheric qualities of their previous work (a few soundtracks, and a commissioned sound work for the Centre Pompidou, where they chose Louise Bourgeois’s installation Precious Liquids as their inspiration) and moves it closer to pop song while keeping the weirdness intact. Given the oneiric qualities of Bourgeois’s work, I was interested in what inspired their choice of Precious Liquids. “The darkness of it, and the humor,” Susman says, “that it’s all-encompassing, with so many different little things, and lots of things that relate to sound.”
“Also the memory, dream side of it,” she continues. That feels like something that Memorial Waterslides picks up on and amplifies. It’s particularly inspiring, given where they make their music: A small garage, which they’ve jokingly called a garden shed. “We’re not a professional studio, we don’t have those funds,” Simms says, “but we do have some nice old tape machines.” It’s an attractive mental image, too, very different to the “laptop as home studio.” “The shed is the opposite of the computer, really,” Susman explains. “You’re just out there with your tools, trying to make something.” “It doesn’t have a window,” adds Simms. “There’s no escape!”
Below, Simms and Susman offer their Bandcamp listening recommendations.
R. Beny
Full Blossom Of The Evening
Cassette, Vinyl LP
Simms: “That was the first record I really discovered on Bandcamp, and I picked it for that reason. He’s called Austin, the guy who made it, and I got in touch with him because I was playing with Wire in the time. We were touring the West Coast of America, where he was based, and we got him to come and open those shows, which was amazing.
“I love that record. It’s become quite a trendy thing, that kind of ambient-based music, but I feel most of it is very forgettable. What he does…I like the wobbly out-there-ness of it, and it’s also pretty but not just pretty, it has some surprises and twists and turns. The way he uses field recordings to bring in a different sense of place, and also the dynamics. It does all the good stuff.”
Sun Ra Arkestra
Singles
Vinyl, Compact Disc (CD)
Simms: “That was a joint choice.”
That album is such fun and a wonderful way of getting started with Sun Ra.
Simms: “That was part of the reason for picking it. It’s sort of aspirational, maybe? I hope we’re somewhere in the realm, in the same way that it goes from tunes to really out-there music. The boundaries are non-existent, and I think that compilation shows the breadth, as a writer and as a band, that they went through at the time. The variation is huge. And I love it all, it’s all good.”
Susman: “They’re definitely up there for us as a band that has such a range. Like Matt said, there’s no limits in what they do, so they go from being completely wild, really out-there, and then there are lovely songs. That openness to doing anything. As a keyboard player, he’s just amazing and that’s really aspirational! [laughs] And the saxophone playing on it. There’s loads of the free jazz stuff about it that I like a lot, the psychedelic, space, trippy side. And then you get these beautiful songs too.”
Simms: “There’s another side to Sun Ra that appeals to me, that not many people talk about: DIY, ahead of its time, releasing records, some of them in hand-painted sleeves. That stuff is just way ahead of the game.”
Thraa
Into Earth
Cassette
Susman: “They’re going to play with us.”
Simms: “That was part of the inspiration, to hopefully encourage people to pick up on them. They’re a new band from Manchester, another duo, and they’re opening for us next month [October] for a few dates in the UK. I’m really looking forward to it. I’ve never seen them live before.
“A mutual friend sent me that record. It reminded me a bit, in a good way, of a lot of the records from about 15 years or so back, on a label called Not Not Fun. There was that wave of very psychedelic, trippy drone music. I don’t necessarily listen to lots of it now—there’s still some I go back to, but I was mad about all that stuff. It reminds me of it in a good way. Doing interesting things with guitar always appeals to me, unorthodox guitars.”
Sababa 5
Sababa 5
Vinyl LP
Susman: “I’m mad about that band. The keyboard player, he’s my favorite keyboard player at the moment. He’s the best around. That album, I could listen to it over and over. His keyboard lines are so catchy, ridiculous catchy, and everything he does, I’m like, ‘Oh my God!’ [laughs] It’s perfect, he gets it just right. He doesn’t do a load of flourishes. He could be just showing off his virtuosity and his technique, but he’s not doing that. It’s simple—not too simple—but it’s not over the top. It’s a line that you can follow, and it’s really exciting.”
I was listening to him play and thinking, “Damn, that’s precise. He’s really in the pocket.”
Susman: “And the band, they’ve got such a good groove together.”
Simms: “It’s restrained.”
Susman: “That’s it! It’s restrained, but there’s also so much joy, and nothing is too much. It’s not too little either. You can tell they’re brilliant musicians, but they don’t have to shove it in your face.”
Brent Cordero & Peter Kerlin
A Sublime Madness
Vinyl LP
Simms: “That came out just as we did our first-ever tour around the UK, when we released those soundtracks on LP. We were driving around, listening to music, and I can remember putting that on, and us both enjoying it, driving around the Yorkshire Dales! That label Astral Spirits, I just like checking out what they put out. On Bandcamp, the way it works with their cassettes and smaller releases, I just really love it. They’re quite a reliable source of music.”
Jim O’Rourke
Steamroom 62
Simms: “He seems to use Bandcamp in a brilliant way. He uses it as a way of putting out music regularly. He’s so prolific; it’s his little website. That’s number 62 in terms of his releases, and they’re often 30 or 40 minutes. I think maybe the word ‘exercises’ is wrong, but I get the impression it’s a piece he’s just worked on for a few days or maybe a few hours—it could be much longer—but they’re often just exploring an idea or a theme.
“In the notes to this one he comments on a few of the musicians he works with a lot, saying, ‘Thanks for playing between the takes,’ so it gives me the idea that he’s clipped all the bits that aren’t used in a project, and then been like, ‘How am I going to make something with this.’ I’m a big fan of him in general, as a musician and producer. That, as a listen, as a piece, it’s so surprising and dynamic. Harmonically and sonically, it’s really playful. Brilliant.”
Agathe Max
SHADOWW
Cassette
Susman: “I’ve known Agathe for more than 10 years. I played a solo gig in France a long time ago and we were on the bill together, and then a few years ago she moved to London, and she played with us a couple of times last year. She’s a really brilliant violin player. She’s in a few bands now, what’s that one she’s in…”
Simms: “A band called Abstract Concrete, with Charles Hayward.”
Susman: “She’s the violin player for that, and she has various other projects. But she makes music solo which, over the years, it’s always changed—she’s always doing something different. She’d just finished this cassette to sell at the gigs she was playing with us, so it was exciting, because it was something really new. Live, the music from that cassette works really well. It’s completely all-enveloping, from the violin and the voice, it’s really immersive. I think it comes across on that cassette, too. There’s quite a journey in that, and a shift. It’s like having a warm bath, and then getting electrocuted. You’re not expecting it! [laughs]
“She can be really out-there. She just really has that range, from very immediate to very experimental, if you listen to all her records as a whole. But that one—I love the music on it, but I also like that it was so new, to sell on cassettes. It’s now only available on Bandcamp, you can’t find it elsewhere. It’s a record where, with repeated listening, you can go really deep into it. I was on a flight, and there was nothing downloaded on my phone, except I had this album on the Bandcamp app. That was the only thing, and it was like in the past, when you had one cassette and you’d just listen to it over and over again, which I used to do. I love doing that.”
Kulku
Reset To Be
Vinyl LP
Susman: “They’re a band I’ve known for a long time, I know one of the members from years back. I sent Matthew a little clip of them playing live, and he said, ‘That’s brilliant, they’re all just playing one note.’”
Simms: “Yeah, ten people playing just one note.”
That’s all you need!
Simms: “Yeah! Don’t overcomplicate it.”
Susman: “It’s really hypnotic. It’s like Moondog meets Suicide. On paper, it’s everything I would love about a band, and then when you hear it, it actually is that! It fulfills all the expectations. They’ve been going for a while, and it seems to run as a collective. I love the acoustic nature of it. There’s brilliant percussion and woodwind on that record, and they’re making this hypnotic trance-y music, but the digital stuff is out the door, it’s what they’ve found around, like the Moondog ethos. It’s really great to hear bands doing that. I just enjoy that record a lot. It’s a kind of ‘feeling’ record. You listen to it and you’re taken somewhere with them. It’s about getting lost in the feeling of the music.”
