Photo: Steve Gullick
On this fine day audiobooks have announced the release of their debut album ‘Now! (in a minute)’ which will be released on November 2.
With this exhilarating news the band share the album’s opening track ‘Mother Hen’.
Speaking about the track, audiobooks say: “We wrote and recorded this on the 2nd day we hung out. Evangeline was so excited to do more work that she travelled across London in her Batman pyjamas so as not to waste any time.”
LISTEN TO ‘MOTHER HEN’ HERE:
On the face of it, Evangeline Ling – a 21-year-old art student and musician from Wimbledon – and David Wrench – one of the most in demand mixers and producers in modern music, a sometime cohort of Julian Cope and former denizen of North Wales – might seem an unlikely pairing. Yet a chance encounter at a mutual friend’s party just one week after David had moved south to the capital very quickly led to an experimental studio session that’s been going on ever since.
Evangeline: “I’d found myself writing these odd stories as text messages on my phone. They were too short to be proper stories… they were fragments. I’d told David about them when we met and he said, “’Come into the studio and let’s put them to music.’” The next day, we started making music.”
David: “Neither of us are any good at small talk so we just got working and it was crazily fast, everything about it. We’ve never spent more than an hour on a track.”
Evangeline: “We’d work on a track and then we’d just sit and do nothing. He’d work on a mix for someone or play some records, I’d have a nap or paint or draw…”
David: “The second time Evangeline turned up at the studio she arrived in her pyjamas. She’d come all the way from Wimbledon to east London in a pair of Batman pyjamas.”
Evangeline: “I hadn’t slept all night, I’d just had this crazy adrenaline. I knew we were doing something really special and I couldn’t wait to get there. I didn’t have any clean clothes, so I just thought, ‘Sod this, I’ve got to go’.”
From their first meeting, Evangeline and David’s friendship has been influenced by the records they flipped through in his newly set up studio in Old Street. Very quickly, the pair found inspiration in music by artists as di-verse as Bauhaus, Aphrodite’s Child, Marilyn Manson, Michael Jackson, Flower Travellin Band, the Fall, Faust, Tropicáalia and Dory Previn.
Evangeline: “Dory frickin Previn, man.”
David: “Her record Mythical Kings and Iguanas is an incredible piece of work; she really was a genius. Lyrically, that’s maybe the closest link to audiobooks.”
If the bracingly honest and often troubled words of Previn helped influence Evangeline’s stories, the music they’re set to comes from an entirely different place. Having developed a kind of psychic musical response to Evangeline’s surrealist texts, David set about soundtracking the weird worlds she was delivering on a daily basis. Much of the resulting music – at times odd, beautiful, unique, hilarious, disquieting, pensive, hypnotic, open, free – is collected together on Now! (in a minute) – the mind-bending follow up to the head-turning four track Gothenburg EP and the duo’s first full length album.
Like the band themselves, Now! (in a minute) doesn’t do the things that you’d expect. While opener ‘Mother Hen’ might be a modernist nursery rhyme sat atop skittering proggy electronics, the dual vocals on the tracks ‘Hot Salt’ and ‘Friends in the Bubble Bath’ perfectly channel the conflict and contradiction of ‘Don’t You Want Me’ (The Human League) into something ultra-modern and almost ludicrously addictive. Elsewhere, the primal, gothic drone of ‘Womanly Blood’ sits like a brooding weather condition until it rips apart thanks to some heavy percussive artillery from Warpaint’s Stella Mozgawa (the only other contributor to the record) and ‘Dance Your Life Away’ sounds like the soundtrack to the kind of inhibition free moon-light voodoo party that you wish your mates had invited you to at Glastonbury last year.
A band that takes its cues from the King of Pop and The Antichrist Super-star, creates music in daily automatic writing sessions and rides the neon ley lines that connect of the North Wales coast to the psycho-bustle of afterhours London are clearly on a very singular path to greatness – a path they’re already someway down, having taken their first footsteps out of the studio and onto the stage for a handful of truly mesmerizing live shows.
Time, then, to welcome these strange superheroes – this inhuman league – into your life. You might not know it yet but the story is already written. It says audiobooks are your new favourite band.
The band are headlining Paper Dress Vintage in Hackney on 27 September.
Tickets are available HERE.
Pre-Order a copy of “Now! (in a minute)” LP & CD HERE
Live Dates
10 Sep – London, UK – Heaven*
27 Sep – London, UK – Paper Dress Vintage
10 Oct – London, UK – Oval Space **
*supporting Wooden Shjips
**supporting Teleman
Read more about audiobooks on their artist page ↓
