London trio Voka Gentle have been playing music together in some form “since the womb”, their guitarist, William J. Stokes tells me. Which might be why their latest album, Domestic Bliss, works so well. Composed of identical twin sisters Ellie and Imogen Mason, and William, Imogen’s husband, the band craft left-field, mercurial pop that’s as hard to box into a genre as it is easy to enjoy.
Recorded at London City University, where the band taught sound workshops in exchange for studio time, their latest LP is a tour-de-force in this synergistic mode of music-making, which yields some sporadically fun results. Domestic Bliss darts from fluid avant-psych to immersive field recordings and glitzy 80s pop, delivered with artfully melodic instincts. Perhaps most notable, though, is that it was nearly all recorded on a binaural head.
“We kind of became obsessed with it. A lot of the album was recorded with it, after Ollie, our drummer, managed to borrow one and it just sounded so good. A lot of them have faces on, but this didn’t. It was just a ball, annoyingly.” She says there aren’t too many of them still in existence: “No one knew how much it was actually worth. We just knew we couldn’t break it!”
Within minutes of hearing Voka Gentle’s music, or talking to them, there’s a sense that they’re a group organically committed to learning about and pushing the boundaries of recording and sound design. The band was formed in London after both Ellie and Imogen’s old band and William’s earlier project ended. Although they originally considered themselves a folk-trio, the group’s sound has changed a lot since then. “Our first stuff was quite layered and dense, but the instrumentation has changed throughout the projects. This album’s quite beat driven, quite repetitive and uses a lot of loops.” Ellie tells me. But they insist that resisting categorisation is key to Voka Gentle, which is less a band and more a “mindset” focused on being “intensely collaborative”, sharing creative authority and following “paths of curiosity”, even when they lead to the strangest places.
Alongside Voka Gentle, William now writes about music, produces and is pursuing a music-related PhD at City University, while Ellie is the in-house engineer at Mute Records and a session musician for the likes of Paolo Nutini and Badly Drawn Boy, and Imogen is studying for an MA in Sound Art and releasing solo music under the moniker sm^sher.
Domestic Bliss began taking shape when the band were looking for studio time. “We needed a recording space and really wanted to get going on the record. Then this opportunity came along to work with some students.” The band began to teach sound workshops in experimental recording techniques using deconstructed versions of their demos before they spent the summer recording. “It was a really cool experience to give them your own song and be like, ‘Yeah, do what you want’”, William says. “It was really similar to the recording process”, Imogen tells me.
These “experimental recording techniques” permeate the sound of the record. Self-produced, the band took liberty of City’s studio time to deeply explore the recording process. “We were putting amps under pianos and recording stuff through snare drums or in different spaces,” Imogen says. “Ellie and I did some vocals together through a slightly broken Space Echo, and there’s also some vocals recorded straight down the phone, as I was in Edinburgh and William and Ellie were in London. I just plugged the phone into the desk and then I passed it.”
But it was the rare stereo microphone that became a fixture for the sessions, sparking the band’s interest in the potentials for binaural recording. “It’s really interesting because everyone’s going on about spatial audio and Dolby Atmos,” William says, “but I think that stereo is just so rich and amazing and binaural is an example. All binaural is basically just mimicking the way that sound is conducted through your head and across your face. And it’s those little phase differences which make things sound so 3D in a way that you don’t get from just setting up two microphones.” Likewise, the album is peppered with various field recordings, many of which recorded with a set of binaural microphones that can be worn as headphones. “The song ‘The Creature’ ends with a binaural recording of a motorbike convention. I was walking through all these people revving their engines together.”
Although drums were provided by Ollie Middleton, and the record was mixed by Sam Petts-Davies (who both worked on the latest Smile project), the band tells me that they self-produced everything. “It’s something that goes hand in hand with our songwriting process”, Ellie says. “We’re not the type of artists that would just hand someone the recording of a vocal and a guitar and be like, ‘Let’s make a whole song.'” In this way, it’s an equal appreciation for the craft of both songwriting and recording that perhaps defines Voka Gentle best. William looks at it as something inherently “collagist”, citing Imogen’s vocals recorded down the phone on ‘You Deserve It!’. “Recording them in that way brought an introspective quality that wouldn’t have existed otherwise”.
While Domestic Bliss is a long way away from the folk music Voka Gentle used to make, it might be best to view their output as an extension of that ethos, jam-focused and ideas based, committed to letting the far-reaching tendrils of each band member grow and twine around any idea they have. They’re about to embark on a UK tour, but it seems like it’s this principle that sits at the centre of the band’s view of the future. “We’re just interested in too much”, Ellie tells me. “There’s like 30 more records before we’ve even scratched the surface of what we’re interested in.”
Domestic Bliss is out this week via state51. Voka Gentle play Acid Horse 26 May 22 – 24
