Earlier this month, we deemed Norther by Ex-Easter Island Head as the finest album of 2024. It’s a love, the band’s Ben D. Duvall tells us, that’s reciprocated. “Even my mum understands it’s a big deal for us!” Who better, then, to have recorded our final subscribers’ release in the form of an utterly sublime live set captured at Acid Horse back in May?
Not that topping the tQ charts is the only marker of what’s been a remarkably prolific 12 months for the Liverpool band. Duvall’s bandmate Andrew PM Hunt – who turned the established trio of Duvall, Ben Fair and John Hering into a quartet when he joined prior to Norther – also released another of the year’s best albums as Dialect, Atlas Of Green (which we placed at number 13). Fair has also just completed a trio of pieces that Duvall describes as “a mixture between songs and plunderphonics that sort of defy categorisation”, and Duvall is working on solo projects too, including a short film about his aeolian music. In a duo with Hunt – under the name Land Trance – he’s also finishing up an album they recorded with the late Philip Jeck. Ex-Easter Island Head were also commissioned to write the score for the dancer and choreographer Aline Costa’s show In Bloom, “and that’s alongside day jobs, as well as new babies arriving!” says Duvall. “John has just had a daughter. So yeah, there’s just been fucking loads!”
And that is to say nothing of a relentless touring schedule. “We’ve probably played more gigs this year than any other,” Duvall notes. “A big milestone for us was doing two European shows with a van! 16 years ago, I was playing bass in a mate’s band on a two-week tour around Europe, and I’ve basically been waiting to do that again ever since.” A highlight, he says, was breakfast with The Bug (aka their now-fellow tQ poll-topper Kevin Richard Martin) after a show in Belgium. “I was a bit too starstruck, but John and Ben had a nice chat with him.”
The workload has required the band to take sacrifices. “I work part-time, and I sometimes wonder, was that the right decision, halving my income?” Duvall admits. “But I don’t think we’d have been able to manage to get stuff done otherwise.” A supportive label helps too. “We’re incredibly grateful to Chris and Jonny at Rocket Recordings who’ve been really supportive in getting the record out there. It’s been our first release with them and we just feel like they’ve really had our backs,” says Duvall. The band have also landed on a ‘seasonal’ approach to forward-planning. “Rather than ‘Right, we meet every Tuesday’, which is how I always pictured being in a band, we’ve got better at being really focused – a bunch of rehearsals, then making them go as far as possible by getting as many shows around them as we can.”
It means that by the time Ex-Easter Island Head are in the thick of a tour, their music is honed to a devastatingly sharp edge. You can hear that on these Acid Horse recordings, where frameworks are established with the most delicate craftmanship imaginable, but within which a kaleidoscope of sound is allowed to shapeshift and sprawl, all the while riding the momentum of driving percussive energy. Duvall says they’ve begun deliberately incorporating more improvisation into their sets, “stretching it out a bit, taking some detours and leaving space for the complete unknown. It helps us to make the moment focussed, to show a little bit of uncertainty. The material gets slightly exploded, slightly zoomed in on so it’s not just a rote repetition of the same 45 minutes of music every night.
“I consider myself, by some margin, to be the worst musician in the group, so as a necessity I like things to be well rehearsed – it’s for the good of my nerves,” Duvall continues. “But I’m also very fortunate in that John, Ben and Andy are all some of the best musicians that I’ve ever seen onstage. I still pinch myself that I’m playing in a group with them. And also, we really care about people getting their money’s worth, getting a solid piece of entertainment. So, I think we owe it to the audience, as well as to ourselves, to shake it up wherever possible.”
Ex-Easter Island Head’s set up where limitations are purposely imposed, so that the band can push and prod against the boundaries, makes for thrilling tension. They’re immensely innovative in the way they do so – wielding a dizzying arsenal of miniature motors, rods and magnets as they rethink the guitar’s capabilities before your eyes and ears. They should be considered among the most innovative avant-garde artists working today. And yet, that idea of entertainment should not be discounted, not least when considering the success of Norther and the immediate appeal of the Acid Horse recordings.
For starters, as Duvall points out, theirs is “very self-consciously beautiful music.” The sheer sublimity of Ex-Easter Island’s sound means that however technical their process, they can appeal to a listener’s heart as well as their head. There’s also a sense of playfulness to the group that particularly comes across live. On ‘Magnetic Language’, for instance, audiences will see the band suddenly take their phones out of their pockets, with recordings of the musicians’ voices played from them and incorporated into the set. “It looks terrible, it totally breaks the spell,” Duvall says. Sometimes they’ll get a laugh – “and obviously you’re not really used to hearing laughter at the minimalist drone gig.”
‘Magnetic Language’ is not, of course, a moment of simple comic relief. “You’ve got to walk a very fine line between gimmickry and something which is intriguing,” Duvall notes. It could also be viewed as something quite theoretical: “a dialogue between technologies,” as he puts it, where the electromagnetic signals coming out of the phones – an ephemeral and constantly evolving technology of the present – react with the pickups on the guitars – virtually unchanged for almost a century. When first sketching the song out, they thought they might use cassette Dictaphones – “aesthetically that felt much more pleasing” – but after confronting the logistical realities of back-up batteries and tapes, they realised “we’ve all got this super-computer in our pocket, that is also of this time right now, and will be of interest in years to come when it’s no longer just a part of the everyday coming into the set.”
‘Magnetic Language’ is just one aspect of Ex-Easter Island Head’s wide-ranging scope. Where that song is shimmering and ethereal, others, like their pounding conclusion to the live set, the older track ‘Six Sticks’, are fiery and direct. Others still have a grand sweep. ‘Magnetic Language’ speaks, however, to something at the band’s core – the fine line between the conceptual and the playful that they toe with such ease.
“I’m really proud of this, and I probably would have downplayed it a bit more in early years when I saw more virtue in us appearing to be more academic, or more studious, but I think we’ve really come to embrace the fact that we’re ‘a band’,” says Duvall as we wrap things up. “That it isn’t ‘the something something ensemble’ who perform composers’ works. Yes, we’re all composers within the band, but at its heart, it’s a band. It’s a band dynamic, and it’s a band experience when you’re watching it. So we definitely want to take into account entertainment, and good old fashioned showbiz!”
Referenced artists
Dialect
Back to the Future: Atlas of Green by Dialect
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