Tone Glow 222: My New Band Believe
An interview with Cameron Picton, formerly of Black Midi, about the importance of communication, Korean experimental filmmakers, and the adventurousness of the song form
My New Band Believe
My New Band Believe is the new solo project of Cameron Picton (b. 1999), largely known as a founding member of the UK rock band Black Midi. After dropping two one-off singles, “Lecture 25” and “Numerology,” Picton released the self-titled My New Band Believe debut earlier this month. His initial desire was to work with a rotating cast of musicians, and with a slew of different artists—most notably the members of caroline—the album features eight tracks of progressive folk music inspired by Bert Jansch, Judee Sill, New Narrative authors, and a desire for openness within the song form. Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Picton on April 17th, 2026 via Zoom to discuss the acoustic guitar, finding ways to avoid his artistic practice from feeling like an obligation, and the ideas behind his new LP.
Joshua Minsoo Kim: I know you just had those in-store shows the past few days. What’s it like playing in record stores versus typical venues?
My New Band Believe: They were cool. I did them as a duo with this guy, Kit Mosely, who I’ve been playing with a lot recently. Kit’s a great guitar player and there’s a lot of interaction between us, and we can transition between the songs in a natural way. We did like five or so, and all the ones that were really good had shops that let us play totally acoustic. Sometimes they have a little PA set up and it sounds weird because you’re using acoustic guitar pickups that generally sound bad—there’s no way getting around it. It just sounds a lot better [totally acoustic] because you can hear the natural sound of the instrument, and you get a lot more of a sense of the room.
What sort of things do you feel like you’ve learned from playing with Kit? What is he bringing out in your playing?
He’s super quick. He has perfect technique, which I don’t really, so we fill in each other’s gaps quite well. I knew of him because he was living with a few friends of mine, but I never had a chat with him until this gig by that Dig That Treasure guy—he runs a radio show but also a festival here in London. He put on this fundraiser for Resonance at Cafe OTO in October. It was like, “You’re not getting paid, but you can do whatever you want.” That Bert and John (1966) album is big for me, and I never had the chance to play in an acoustic guitar duo like that, so I thought it’d be good to try. And I wanted to play with Kit for a long time too so I just messaged him to see if he was up for it. Also, we were going on first, so if it was rubbish then no one would know, and if it was good then we could carry on. We met the week before and had a couple rehearsals.
What are the gaps that Kit might have that you’re filling in, and vice versa?
Kit just doesn’t really write songs, generally. So I’ll usually have an idea and we’ll develop it together. In the shows we’ve been playing, he’s playing steel string while I’m playing classical guitar. You can really lean into the strength of both instruments. There’s a lot more attack with him, but my classical is quite loud. You can play a lot with dynamics.
With My New Band Believe, you’re focusing a lot more on the acoustic guitar. What sort of things do you feel like you’ve learned about the acoustic guitar from composing with it and playing with it?
It’s funny. It’s limited because you don’t get that much sustain out of it, especially when it’s amplified. It’s great when you’re playing in a smallish room and it’s reverberating, but for the recording there were bits where I was like, I need to have something that’s sustaining because otherwise it’s such a percussive instrument. For a lot of the recent shows we’ve been leaning into that, and you can get a lot of interplay between the two guitars where you say, “Whatever I’m doing, make sure you’re accenting a different beat.”
You mentioned Bert [Jansch], and I know you were inspired a lot by his music, but I know you also like Judee Sill. Her debut is one of my go-to answers for my favorite album of all time. What is it about her music, her singing, or her songwriting that you’re drawn to?
She talks about such serious topics in a way that’s not super light—there’s a bit of humor to it. There’s this thing of following a humorous line with something serious, or making a serious line funny with the line after it. It’s also a few melodic things. In my song “Actress,” the chorus melody was [inspired by] “Crayon Angels.” I was like, “Oh, this is just basically that,” and I carried on for the rest of the chorus.
The thing I love about all her music is that she has a very particular way of singing. In “Crayon Angels” she says the word “laugh” in a really memorable way—you can really feel the contours of every word with the way she intones.
The way she speaks is so weird as well. She’ll speak like (with emphasis) this, and then speeds up and slows down within sentences.
Right. I love the way she sings on “Jesus Was a Crossmaker”—the melody’s bobbing up and down the whole time, like (hums the vacillating topline).
It’s quite campy as well. She’s got this liturgical thing going on, but then “He’s a bandit and a heartbreaker / Jesus was a crossmaker” is a silly line, but she carries it! It’s great.
I’m assuming you know about her backstory, how she was in jail?
Yeah. And she got dropped from her label because she outed David Geffen. She was on tour in the UK and it was something like, “David Geffen is more focused on his boyfriend” at this show in Leeds, and he found out.
In speaking about this, I’m wondering if you were trying specific things with vocals on this album. What’s your relationship with your voice? Did you sing much when you were a child?
I sang a lot at school. I was in school productions like Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and I was in the school choir. Group singing is obviously a big thing at a lot of primary schools in England, but it’s quite casual. I didn’t really get back into it until, to be honest, more recently. At the Brit School there were loads of singers already, so you didn’t get a lot of opportunities to focus on singing because there were people who were actual vocalists, like an Adele-type thing. Black Midi slowly got more into it and I thought, okay this is maybe something I’ll be interested in getting better at. Then when I did that single, “Lecture 25,” that felt like I finally had a way of exploring how to deliver words. It felt like something new.
What was the newness you felt in singing that song?
The session was from 11PM to 4AM. We were doing it right at the end of the session, and Margo [Broom] and Seth [Evans] really pushed me to go further. I’ve never really had that. When we were doing Black Midi records, you’d just do it and the producer would go, “That’s amazing!” That’s the right thing to do when you’re recording someone’s vocals because it’s a very vulnerable thing. But with this it was cool because I have a good relationship with Seth, and Margo is a no-bullshit person, so they were both like, “No no, do it more like this. Just go for it!” There would be times when they wouldn’t record things and just ask me to push myself to the point of failing. Through that, I could get somewhere that was beyond where I’d usually go. I felt like I actually got to a place that was a lot more developed than what I was doing with Black Midi.
With Black Midi, do you feel people were afraid to push back against ideas? Did you feel like there wasn’t enough friction to have the band grow?
There was a lot of push and pull on the first album [Schlagenheim (2019)], and once we did the second [Cavalcade (2021)] and third [Hellfire (2022)], it was this weird thing where you couldn’t really say if you didn’t like anything. Or there was this thing where we felt we had to follow everything to its natural conclusion. This can be good, but sometimes it ends up on the album and it’s not the best thing it could’ve been. Even though everyone wants it to be the best thing, people want to trust each other. This leads to interesting results, but it’s less collaborative. Speaking for myself, sometimes you know that whatever you’re doing could be better and it’s useful to have someone to push against. Someone will say, “Have you tried this?” and you’ll say, “No, don’t think so.” You can then justify why to both yourself and to the other person. But if you have this thing where nobody says anything and you’re getting nothing back… it’s not ideal.
Is there a song on the new album where you feel like there was a big difference between the initial idea and how it ended up, specifically based on communication and feedback?
The last song, “One Night.” We recorded it with the caroline guys and I was like, this is cool but I’m not really sure about it as a composition—does it stand up to something like “Heart of Darkness” instrumentally? The lyrics are really good on it though, and I was pushed by Mike [O’Malley] and Jasper [Llewellyn] to accept that the music does a good job of foregrounding the lyrics. Similarly, “Heart of Darkness” was the opposite thing where I pushed to have it my way. The end of it, where I have Steve Noble and Caius Williams playing, Jasper thought it should be a separate track. I was like, “No, it’s gotta be the full thing, it’s gotta be part of the same idea.”
It’s interesting to hear this notion of lyrics being at the forefront of a song. Was it a challenge to do that with My New Band Believe since Black Midi’s songs were a lot busier?
Yeah, I think so. That’s why that song is so interesting. And it’s a single-tracked vocal while the rest of the songs on the album are double-tracked. I did it all very quickly, and I didn’t think much of it—I didn’t know what value it had for the record. Over time it was like, “Oh, this is actually really good.” With the lyrics, I was interested in this idea of playing with perspectives, with obscuring different narrative outcomes in a way where there’s a justification for each, where every line could have a dark or light reading depending on how you hear it. With “Target Practice,” it’s a bit more obvious. I didn’t really discuss the lyrics with [caroline] and I remember Jasper said off the bat, “The chorus [of “One Night”] is really nice, I like how positive it is.” But you could read it as a negative thing, too. That’s what I was going for—not necessarily ambiguity in the narrative, but the outcome having a dual reading.
Was that inspired by particular artists or authors or experiences you’ve had in your own life?
In your daily life, you’ll have people telling you about their interactions with another person. As a hypothetical example, let’s say two of your friends have fallen out and they tell you completely different stories. It’s like… okay (laughter). It’s a bit like that. And a lot of the stuff I was reading while I was writing the lyrics was New Narrative writers like Robert Glück. In Margery Kempe (1994), the narrative of the book merges where he becomes Margery and Margery becomes him, and Margery’s getting with Jesus and he’s getting with this guy in the ’90s. What happens to Margery is that suddenly she’s on a train, and he’s suddenly in Nuremberg in 1413 or something. There’s a lot you can play with perspective, especially when you’re the only voice on the record. I can modulate the delivery, and I think there’s bits of that in “Actress” with the showtune bit. And while I inhabit that, the song’s verses don’t change so much. It doesn’t need to be signposted; it’s not gonna be like, “I’m gonna do the nasty line read and now I gotta do the nice line read (laughter). I let it just wash over you.
Earlier you mentioned that you were in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and in choir. What was important about those experiences for you?
I was really young when I did Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. I was like 9 or 10. I’m not sure I took anything with me (laughter). I was just interested in performance, and it’s this weird thing where I took more of a backseat on that front in Black Midi, and then with this… when I first started doing the solo shows, I did a course in Laban movement, and I became a lot more interested in things like this. The scripted nature of it is interesting because it allows you to inhabit a different world. When you get on stage and do the songs, you’re in the music. I guess it’s the same when you’re in a stage show and doing the production and everything else goes to the side. It’s something I would’ve liked to have done more, but in secondary school my drama teacher had a beef with me (laughter). It’s this feeling where you’re really going for it. It’s the same with listening to music: you wanna get to a state where you’re really listening and everything else is gone.
How was it different when performing in Black Midi?
The beginning of Black Midi was kind of like that. Towards the end, it was a bit like… we were making money, so it felt like it was out of obligation. We still enjoyed it, but we started this when we were 17 and now we’re 23. I could stop, but what else would I do? And how would I make any money? Everyone probably felt a bit like that toward the end, and when that happens you’re not really in the music—you’re just playing the songs.
Is that something you guys talked about with each other?
A little bit, but towards the end the communication was pretty bad, so these sort of things weren’t really talked about. There have been conversations since then, like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” But around that time it was hard. In my experience, with having a lot of friends who are musicians in bands, a lot of them have been in them for a long time or have been in a similar position as Black Midi: they started the band when they were a teenager and now they’re approaching 30, or are 30, and still doing the band. And maybe the band isn’t even 100% of their income—they’ll tour for six months of the year and it makes 60% of their income, and for the other six months they’ll work a little bit. And then maybe it’s not something that they enjoy and they’d rather be doing something else, but because they’re doing it with friends they can’t step away because then the band would break up. And there might be people who are more invested in the band than others, too. I do think there are more people in bands who are doing it out of obligation than people realize, and at a certain point the music suffers—the album isn’t being done for the right reasons.
I know that with this solo project you were initially playing shows under different names, and that the intention was to play with different members. It feels like a circuitous way to prevent yourself from feeling the same way again, where you have this obligation to your friends and the band itself. Would that be accurate to say?
There are positive reasons behind it as well, but that’s obviously part of it. I think you get something interesting when you tell a group of people, “Let’s just do something for six months or a year, and really commit to it, and then after we can decide if we should carry on or do something else.” And then there’s no reason that anybody couldn’t just jump back in, either.
The initial idea was to do a Neil Young & Crazy Horse-type thing where I’d do the album with caroline and then go to, I don’t know, Idles and say, “Let’s do an album together,” but still do the same songs. And then the arrangements would be different anyway. After that I could go with The Chemical Brothers. Obviously neither of those examples would work (laughter) but that was kind of the original idea, and it’s become a lot more open.
Did you approach caroline with a specific expiration date in mind? And how did it become more open?
When I started talking with caroline, I knew that they worked very slowly and that they were working on the second album [caroline 2 (2025)]. This was while Black Midi was still touring—I wanted time after the tour was finished to do solo shows. I wanted to go down various avenues and not really worry about it being a proper thing. Working with them, I knew it’d have to be like a year or so, which gave me some time to write songs while being able to tell a record label that there was something going to be done in the future. What happened is that the songs I initially brought to caroline were unfinished, and I thought that they could help finish the gaps in the songs—that’s how it could be collaborative. But then I started touring solo with Black County, New Road and thought, well, there’s no point in bringing songs that I think are unfinished, so I finished them. And after that tour is when me and caroline came together. I was like, “Actually, these songs are finished now, so the collaboration isn’t going to be on the writing anymore,” and then it naturally opened up after that.
Do you think your songs evolved while playing them live, too?
When I did the solo shows, all the songs were meant to be played live with solo guitars. And while the album’s got a big sound, all of them are reducible to guitar and voice. I guess that’s what we did at the in-store thing this week. And that was the thing of writing the songs—they had to have musical interest rather than just strumming out chords. They had to have strong melodies and lyrics I could deliver that could then be interpreted differently at every show, where they could reveal themselves whenever I played.
That’s super fascinating. So this notion of the lyrics having dual meanings is partly so you don’t get bored of playing the songs live?
Some of the songs. Some of the songs on the record I didn’t play live much, like “Pearls” and “One Night,” which I used earlier as an example of something that was most going down that road anyway. “Actress” was definitely like that. I remember doing shows and feeling differently about the lyrics depending on how I felt that day. It becomes a much more interesting way to perform—you react to your environment. Obviously I have enjoyed playing improvised music in Black Midi, but it’s nice to react to your environment even within set song structures.
For the last six months, a lot of the shows we’ve been doing as a band have not involved a great deal of money because we’re playing in a small room or whatever. I’d usually ask one of the band members to do a solo set to support the band, and that would massively inform how the set went afterwards. Like, Tara Cunningham did a solo set before we played with her and it’s just this thing where I never played with her before, and we didn’t rehearse any of the shows so I don’t think she made soundcheck—I had no idea what she was going to do. There was just more space for her playing, and it was a lot more tailored for her. I guess that’s a natural thing of playing with people anyway, but having that 25 minutes to listen deeply to how she played affected the rest of the set.
Can you give an example of a song where it changed as a result of a particular performance?
I think “Love Story” is one like that. We do it in a different key to the record, so I get a different feeling for it every time. That one feels totally open for me. It’s interesting because you can’t really sing it the same way—it’s lower, so to sing it with the exact same melody would be awkward. It forces you to explore a bit more with the vocal and, through that, there are these different line readings. But also, it might just be a tweet you read before the show (laughter). Or maybe you’ll bump into an opp (laughter). And because of that, certain lines might become more poignant.
We played Rewire the other weekend and I was asked in another interview about it—it was like a Rewire promo interview. They were like, “Rewire is a festival for adventurous music,” which is great, but I was a bit like… this is a songs thing. And I thought, there’s no reason to contrive doing some kind of totally free set because we’re doing Rewire, but the songs within themselves have a lot of space to be changed. I’m taking big swings and sometimes big misses with the vocal line and extending sections and stuff. The song form still has value as “adventurous music.”
What are some of the big misses you’ve made?
There’s this live video that’s kind of unfinished called “Kick Me.” There are points with the vocals where you can hear me go for it and I go, aughhhh (laughter). There’s bits of the songs when I was editing it together where I was like, should I correct this? Then there were certain lines where I sang the wrong lyrics and it gave the wrong impression. But there are other bits where I was like, it’s important to keep this in. The more you listen to it, it all just becomes part of the song.
Can you talk a bit about the arrangements for your songs? I’m curious about Mike and Jasper’s roles, specifically. What would not be present in these songs if they weren’t on the record?
They were useful in being honest about certain sections. It was the first time I was doing something without a normal band structure around me, and those guys had obviously produced their own records, but I think it was a lot about them giving me confidence. Like, I don’t need a proper producer like Dan Carey to do something like this. I tried to record “Opposite Teacher” a few times and they said, “Just do it in your bedroom.” They also have a lot of contacts for people I wanted to play with. I was reacquainting myself with the musical world in London—I had just been touring so much that it was a nice route back in.
I was re-finding people who were into adventurous music, not to use the Rewire phrase (laughter). People who were open. For example, Steve Noble doesn’t really do any session work, and when I asked him I thought there’d be no way he’d want to do this. But it was this thing where he just loves music and was down. He’s very serious in terms of how he approaches the music, but he’s super open. With all the people who were involved, the best experiences were when people were open to taking big swings, and while there were some misses, there’d be a big hit in there as well. That’s what was exciting—pushing ourselves and seeing where we could go.
I didn’t make demos for any of the songs either, so it was kind of like… similar to how I left the songs initially open for caroline, I left a lot of the arrangements open, but there were things like the end of “Heart of Darkness” where I didn’t know what to do. The obvious thing would be to put a drone under it… but that’s quite boring (laughter). It was hard to work out what else to do while building a sense of intensity. And the thing is, you can labor over something for ages and then someone comes in and plays and it’s like, “Oh, that’s amazing. This is it.” It’s about being open to things being different to how you expected them to be, and then following that to its natural conclusion.
Is there a song on the album where you were most surprised by how it ended up based on your initial vision?
“Pearls.” I like how much it breaks the fourth wall of the album. It’s constantly taking you out of the song, knocking the song off its course. And also, I liked physically leaving the studio at the end of the song.
That’s a total caroline thing, yeah. The idea of making the presence of the room a compositional element.
That’s one thing that they helped me with—allowing these ideas to be properly explored, that you could just go with a phone recording into a different room as long as it had the right narrative effect. I made one of these mixtape things where a lot of it is just the sound of the street I live on. It’s a really busy street and every so often you get cars that are playing music that pass by each other, and then there’s a split-second remix of, I don’t know, Beyoncé or Tudd Rundgren with drum ‘n’ bass. That’s not on there, but you’ll hear this completely random stuff.
I know that you were initially interested in getting Van Dyke Parks on the record.
Yeah, and that’s a similar thing of getting Steve Noble where, why not just ask this guy who’s obviously not gonna do it? (laughter). Van Dyke Parks was really sweet and funny on the emails, but I think I maybe emailed at too early a stage of making the record. I just wanted to see what would happen. Song Cycle (1967) is a record I really love, and I love his work with Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys—everyone does—and I was like, why not ask? There were lots of people who were asked to be on the record who couldn’t make it, or they thought they wouldn’t be right for it. There were probably as many people who played on the record as those didn’t play but were asked.
There’s a promo photo for the band and it’s riffing on the self-titled Velvet Underground album. What about that album is meaningful to you?
It’s one of the albums I return to every few months. There was a period where I listened to it to go to sleep. I also just love the guitar solo on “What Goes On.” The guitar solo is always different in your head than what it is, and that’s why it’s kind of sick—it’s never actually what you think it is. I was talking with Kit about this the other day. Like, on The Beatles’ “Come Together,” you think it’s bum-bum-bu-da-da-da but it’s actually just bum-bum-dum-da. The tom makes you think there’s that kind of fill in there.
Oh my god you just blew my mind. I was thinking of the bassline in my head and I totally thought it was like that, but you’re right—it’s the tom.
It’s this interaction between the instruments that makes it sound like the performance of one instrument. But that’s an aside. The thing about doing the homage was that the album cover looks a lot like that photo, though it also looks like the Band on the Run (1973) cover and the VU (1968-1969/1985) album cover. My friend’s brother is a photography student and he had access to the same film and camera. We were like, “Okay, this seems like the right thing to do.” All of the press shots were organized on the day of with whoever could come down. Like, let’s get anyone who could look a bit like Doug Yule (laughter).
I’m still fascinated by what you mentioned about “Come Together.” Is that something that you’re thinking about with your own arrangements? That seems like something that’s hard to do intentionally because it has a bit to do with how a song exists in memory.
The beginning of “Actress” was super labored over, like the first two minutes of the song—the guitars. There’s lots of swapping between different guitars and some of it is recorded in a studio, some of it’s recorded in a home studio, and some of it’s recorded on a Zoom mic in my bedroom. I guess that’s different because it’s more of an intentional swapping, but it’s quite hard to make that feel natural and not take you out of the flow of it.
There are other tracks, like the live recording of the “Kick Me” song, where there are interacting parts where melodies are passed between one another. I think there are some bits I mixed out towards the end; there were loads of guitar bits where I’ll play like a baby monkey, playing bum notes, and I’d do some overdubs to see what would happen. When you listen through, there’s an unexpected interaction between that and another part, so you can cut everything out except this one muted note that’s totally out of time. It’s more of a diversionary thing; I don’t think it necessarily affects how good or bad a song is—it’s just a fun, interesting technique. I guess that’s the thing with the acoustic guitars—you’re limited to the effects that you can put on it. With an electric guitar you have 10 billion pedals you can use, you have amps and pickups. With an acoustic guitar it’s just a box with strings, so you end up developing different techniques to get interesting sounds.
I wanted to ask about the “One Night” music video that Park Kyujae made. How did you stumble upon his films?
One of the cooler videos we did with Black Midi was with this Icelandic guy [Vilhjálmur Yngvi Hjálmarsson] we met at a festival in Iceland. He made this really cool video that had like 50 views, and then he made a music video [of “Chondromalacia Patella”] that was really cool. When you start talking about music videos with a label, they’ll suggest these production companies like Canada. And obviously that’s fine, but I find that a lot of these music videos are ways for a director to show off that they can get a gig as an advert director.
Yeah, that’s exactly it. You’ll go to their website and you’ll see it all laid out, and often the music videos are some of the earlier stuff they’ve made.
Yeah, and the trajectory is that they’ll do short films or music videos where they won’t make money, and then they can move on to making high-end adverts. But all these videos look the same, they have the same kind of narrative, they have the same kind of tricks. Every couple months, I’d do a deep dive of UbuWeb and then find different directors. Kyujae’s films aren’t really accessible, and I don’t think he’s ever had a screening in London, but you can figure things out. I found this one Korean director, Kyungmook Kim, who I really like as well. I thought about asking him, but I didn’t. I can’t remember how I found him but I think I was just looking through a list of Korean directors. Often with these people, they’re students or they’re early in their careers so you can just DM them. I just DM’d Kyujae and was like, “Would you wanna do this?” I honestly thought he wouldn’t because his films are really good, and I feel like good filmmakers aren’t usually interested in making music videos (laughter). He knew about Black Midi though, so he was down.
He knows a lot about music! I’m friends with him because I showed his works last year, and one of his films has an Éliane Radigue soundtrack. I was pleasantly surprised that he made the video.
Yeah, it’s really good. I need to find more directors for other music videos because I want to do one for every track.
I can give you a list of filmmakers if you want more experimental ones.
That’d be great. It’s funny—I would also spend loads of time finding people who made interesting [Instagram] Reels, but you can’t contact them… I don’t think they know how to really use their phones (laughter). Like, they know how to upload these Reels but they maybe haven’t sorted out their DM requests and other things.
I’m shocked you mentioned Kyungmook Kim. That’s a deep cut. He has this early film, Faceless Things (2005), which is the only Korean film I’ve ever seen that is explicitly gay and also explicit in content. It’s more explicit than most gay films I’ve seen.
That’s the one with the hidden camera, right?
Yeah, it’s one of my favorite Korean films, just nothing else like it. And after that he made stuff that was a lot more accessible.
Yeah, he made a sitcom or something. It’s maybe like Van Dyke Parks where there’s something crazy early on and everything they’ve done since is so varied that you’re not sure what you’re gonna get when you work with them.
Is there anything we didn’t talk about today that you wanted to mention?
No, I don’t have anything. Thank you very much, these were very thoughtful questions.
There’s a question I end all my interviews with and I wanted to ask it to you. Can you share one thing you love about yourself?
I’ve read your interviews before so I knew this question was coming. In the past, I would’ve said that I’m super organized and I’m a reliable person, but I think that’s not the case anymore—I’m losing things all the time (laughter). I nearly left my guitar on the train the other day. I’m turning up late to things. But I’ve really enjoyed becoming a band leader in a very laissez-faire way. I’m happy with the way the band’s operating. It gives musicians the space to come in, even if it’s on a one-show basis, and do whatever they want. It’s easy to say, “Oh, it’s totally open, you can do whatever you want,” but then there are certain parameters and taste things where you’re like, “Mmm… don’t do that.” As far as I can tell, the musicians do feel like they can explore things within the music that are personal to them.
It’s interesting in the live-ness of it. When you’re doing a recording, you get the feeling that this is the only document that’s ever gonna exist that anyone’s gonna care about. But placing more emphasis on the live-ness means things can open up. If someone starts playing something where you’re like, “Well… that’s corny,” you still have to think about what you can do that can play well with it, to make them sound even better. And it’s a different proposition when you’re recording; you have a specific idea because it’s gonna be on an album. In a live set, it’s just what you’re doing now, and it might be different tomorrow.
Before the band broke down, we discussed the hypothetical fourth Black Midi album. The capability was there to make multi-track live recordings of any set. And it’s kind of what “Kick Me” is. We wanted to take the multi-track and treat every gig as a take of the song, so we’d be performing each night but also tracking the album. And then you can add loads of overdubs, or like with “Kick Me,” we’d just take every good bit from every show and splice them together. I’m interested in exploring that now, and all of the shows have been recorded—we recorded the Rewire show. We’ll see if something comes to fruition.
My New Band Believe’s self-titled album is out now via Rough Trade. The album can be purchased at the label’s website and at Bandcamp.
Thank you for reading the 222nd issue of Tone Glow. You want potatoes or rice tonight?
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