With this year’s Field Day set to be their finest edition yet, lining up Pixies, Jon Hopkins, The Horrors, East India Youth, Fat White Family, Omar Souleyman, James Holden, Erol Alkan, Daniel Avery, Danny Brown, Evian Christ, Jessy Lanza and Jagwar Ma – to name but a few – over the two days, the Quietus thought we’d bring together all of our interviews, Baker’s Dozens, mixes and the like with the appearing acts in one handy portal. Crucially, watch this space, as we’ll be posting more features in the lead-up to the event, which takes place on June 7-8 in Victoria Park, London, and head to the Field Day website to get hold of tickets.
All We Are – June 7
Photograph courtesy of Jon Bergman
Guro Gikling: "We never really discussed how we wanted to sound. We just jammed and we have different influences – probably due to where we come from and what kinds of music we each listen to – and it all kind of merged together. We found something that felt like us – and it was ‘Bee Gees on diazepam’. A friend of the producer of our first single made that up and it totally made sense. It gets to the core of what we are about. Our sound was totally unintentional. We never set off aiming to be different. It’s distinctive because of who we are and where we have come from. It’s nothing to do with us trying to be alternative."
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Neneh Cherry & RocketNumberNine – June 7
Photograph courtesy of Cat Stevens
Neneh Cherry on fellow Field Day artist Daniel Avery’s Drone Logic: "This album came my way as a result of my DJ’ing a bit more of late and I tuned into it then. It’s such a simple concept, he’s not really doing anything new, maybe a new sound here and there but that’s dance music. He does it so damn well and I find myself listening to this album now without my DJ hat on at home and it’s seriously grown into a good buddy."
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Lesley Chow marks the 25th anniversary of Cherry’s debut album, Raw Like Sushi: "On the first track, ‘Buffalo Stance’, Cherry already comes across as a fully formed artist: powerful and casually multicultural, as we might expect from an African-Swedish singer raised in Yorkshire and Long Island. But Cherry is no "minority" demanding to be empowered: this is a performer who originates a new sound without asking for permission. Her voice immediately assumes a central position; there’s no sense of her breaking through from the margins. Her first act as leader is to call out the members of her team: first, the hi-hat, then the tambourine, and finally the DJ and his records. It’s as if, before the track can begin, each circle has to be set spinning within the Cherry universe, and she is in a position to control all of them."
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Evian Christ – June 7
Photograph courtesy of Andrew Ellis
Joshua Leary: "I’m absolutely a proponent for this cheesy rap, EDM stuff that anyone with any sort of taste seems to hate. There tends to be a high critical rejection of that kind of music on the basis that it’s very purpose-driven, there’s a drop, it kind of plays into its own tropes too much. But there’s something about those shows, something inherent to contemporary rap production, that makes people want to go crazy when you drop an 808 kick and have those skittering high-hats. It’s something that TNGHT captured really well because [at] their live shows, obviously people go insane. And people go insane at Pete Swanson shows. It’s kind of a no-brainer to me to draw lines between those. Even though those fan bases have no real mutual middle ground – there’s not many people that would go to a Pete Swanson show and go to a Skrillex show and enjoy both. But for me – Pete will probably kill me for saying it – it’s dance music, it’s loud, it’s super abrasive, people go nuts to it. And I think Waterfall is somewhere between those two ideals."
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James Holden – June 7
"I guess The Inheritors is a manifestation of a permanent double-edged thing that I have with the club world. I still think that going out, dancing, is the most incredible way of experiencing music. In many ways it’s the deepest level of participation that an audience can have; if you’re dancing, you’re engaged in it, you’re really fully experiencing it. I went to a recent lecture at the Barbican on the neurology of music, and there was some discussion about measuring the brain waves of musicians playing together, discussing it as being almost telepathically linked. It’s not, of course, it’s more rational than that, but music is still something abstract in the air that is linking up brains, and it’s impossible to truly measure. I find that absolutely fascinating."
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The Horrors – June 8
Photograph courtesy of Nic Shonfeld
Faris Badwan on Royal Trux’ Accelerator in his Baker’s Dozen: "That’s what’s so great about so many records I like… they often have a partnership of two people and their music couldn’t have happened any other way. I feel The Horrors are like that a bit because we’ve seen so many bands come and go in the ten years since we’ve been a band. It feels like such a lottery whether a band stays together or not. But, on the other side of that, for us it feels like we could never actually break up. I guess that’s an odd thing to say. That’s about as optimistic as I get, probably."
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John Wizards – June 7
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Jessy Lanza – June 7
"I write the lyrics alone mostly, late at night, in my little box closet of a studio. I don’t want to come off as sounding like lyrics aren’t important to me, because they are, but when I’m writing I’ll often be doing these vocal takes and not really sure of what I was saying, and I’ll just say what seems to fit in right at the time. A lot of times I don’t remember what the actual lyrics of those songs are. It was late at night, I recorded a bunch of stuff, and then I’ll go back and edit, things get pushed around."
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Seun Kuti & Fela’s Egypt 80 – June 7
"Now I believe young people in Africa need to organise, become more calculating and see the big picture. Nobody can help us except ourselves. "Africa Rising" and all that bullshit, it’s only supporting capitalism. Africa is rising for capitalists. We want Africa to rise for the common man. The adverts on BBC and CNN about the so-called growing business atmosphere in Africa is not getting to the common African man, it is not benefitting us, it is benefitting maybe two or three per cent of the population. The rest of us, all we see is the corruption of our society and mass pollution of our environment."
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Lunice – June 7
Lunice, one half of Field Day alumni TNGHT, on his new album: "I started it at least two years ago, [but since then] I was just learning from all the experiences through the TNGHT project, and I hoped to add those towards my album. I just want to make it a little bit different from a regular kind of EP or album – I want to approach it in the same way I do my shows. I’ve got a lot of energy at my shows, I’m very performative; that gave me the idea, I want to try to translate that into a musical project, having the same energy I have onstage and on my album."
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Metronomy – June 7
Joe Mount: "I never write very literal songs. I take ideas and things that have gone on and turn them into songs. There’s nothing about ‘I’m Aquarius’ which is true, but in my head, none of that really matters anyway. I quite like it when people might think that I have some dysfunctional relationship. I imagined someone half-heartedly buying a ring for someone at a Cash Converters-type shop and then thinking, ‘I can pawn it back!’ like it doesn’t matter. I’m getting much more excited about what lyrics can do."
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Oneohtrix Point Never – June 7
Daniel Lopatin: "Simple, gestural things about acute moments that make them feel like an object instead of a musical convention. The purpose [on R Plus Seven] was not to aggravate people by teasing them or giving them blue balls – that’s maybe just an understandable reaction to having certain kinds of expectations from music. I’m not interested in playing cat-and-mouse games with people. I find that it doesn’t have to feel like an arduous thing in that sense."
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Pixies – June 8
Photograph courtesy of Andy Keilen
Joey Santiago on AC/DC’s Highway To Hell in his Baker’s Dozen: "I saw them on that tour when Bon Scott had died; he’d just died and Brian Johnson had just taken over, and I was totally sceptical, and then it was like, ‘Oh, he’s fucking good!’ And actually, when Kim left the band, and we’re going, ‘Aw shit, we’re fucked’, and we’re talking about what we’re going to do, and then we’re like, ‘Fucking AC/DC replaced the fucking lead singer! We can do this! [sombrely] We shall overcome!’"
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Simon Price discusses ‘Isla De Encanta’ from Come On Pilgrim, in our Beyond The Hits feature: "In his second year, the U-Mass student was tempted away to Puerto Rico for six months. ‘Isla De Encanta’, built on a dramatic Hispanic chord sequence and sung in the faltering Spanish parodied so brilliantly by Chris Morris on ‘Motherbanger’, is a love letter to that Caribbean territory, and (with several other Pixies songs) comprises a musical equivalent to Hunter S. Thompson’s The Rum Diary. Fifty per cent Big Black and fifty per cent Paco de Lucía, this is the song, along with its immediate predecessor in the …Pilgrim tracklisting, ‘Vamos’, on which Pixies accidentally invented a whole new genre: flamencore."
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Temples – June 8
James Bagshaw: "A lot of people go to producers because they have songs sitting there and they don’t know how they need to be portrayed. We knew exactly how we wanted to portray the songs so there was no need to get in a producer. I had our set-up at home: I’ve been recording for a few years, just listening to records and dissecting how they’re made. I wasn’t going to audio engineering classes! It’s the purest way, when you’ve got a vision for how it’s going to sound. There hasn’t been a single compromise on [Sun Structures]. We thought that was unheard of – releasing a full album to the world, you’d expect to make compromises, but we’re on a great record label which trusts our judgement. We’re very proud of the album."
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Warpaint – June 7
The band’s Theresa Wayman discusses their self-titled second album: "With ‘Drive’, it feels like this big, dramatic soundscape. There’s an undercurrent going on through the whole song, like a roaring river or something. ‘Keep It Healthy’ just sounds so much like a Warpaint song to me that it’s hard to imagine it being compared to anything else. Flood’s a wizard! At this point in his career, he just stands back and commands the machines to work for him, and they do, because they love him. They work really well for him."
