After building a home studio the SMD musician and Arctic Monkeys and Depeche Mode producer James Ford picked up no less than 18 instruments – and a microphone – in order to make his beguiling debut LP. Words by Jeremy Allen. All portraits by Pip Bourdillon
Simian Mobile Disco's second live album offers an oblique answer to a series of questions about live dance music. Chad Parkhill presses the duo of James Ford and Jas Shaw about their motives in releasing this document of their show
As she prepares to release her new EP with Simian Mobile Disco, Luke Turner sits down with Beth Ditto and finds that, a million record sales down the line from that song, Gossip's singer is still an unreformed Arkansas punk. Just with a better mattress
Rhian E. Jones delves deep in to Viv Albertine's autobiography, finding much more than just another punk memoir, something more like a treatise on socially and culturally accepted and expected modes of sex and sexuality, of femininity and the impact, immediate and enduring, of those eponymous clothes, music and boys
Digging into Klara Lewis' second full-length, Amelia Phillips finds an artist balanced on the knife edge of internal/external experience, and a musical narrative that puts the listener at the subjective forefront even as it details and abstracts the objectivity of the physical world around it