It’s the crest of a London heatwave, concrete and tarmac reflecting the blasting sunshine back on itself in an endless sweltering loop. A weak breath of air conditioning in the black back room at the ICA offers little respite, so those there to watch a mesmeric performance by Victoria Rose and Stone Filipczak, aka @ (pronounced ‘at’) must resort to the white paper fans handed out upon entry. When unfurled, each reveals the logo of 4AD – the name of @’s new label, whose showcase night the gig is a part of, flaps back at the musicians from multiple points among the crowd as they play. Primarily using just guitars and vocals (though there’s the occasional inflection of wind instruments), without backing tracks or the wider touring lineup they’ve used at points in the past, in its most minimalist form @’s music is quietly transfixing, flowing slowly and with intent through the thick and humid air.
The nature of their onstage setup “ebbs and flows,” says Filipczak, when he and Rose speak to tQ over Zoom a few weeks later. “Right now, it makes sense to do it as a duo while we figure out the foundation of new material, the core parts that make up the backbone of the songs.” It speaks to a commitment to let things evolve naturally that’s been present from the band’s first stages as a casual and remote back-and-forth between the pair over lockdown. They had met beforehand in the Boston DIY music during a short period where both were based in the city, but by the pandemic found themselves 100 miles apart – Filipczak in Baltimore and Rose in Philadelphia. During a wider text chat about music, one day Rose suggested that Filipczak add some soft percussion to one of her finely-hewn acoustic compositions, which led in turn to their first song, ‘Star Game’. This evolved into a record’s worth of material, crafted at their own pace and self-released in 2021. In 2023, a reissue by Washington DC indie Carpark Records garnered them a wider cult following.
A subsequent EP, Are You There God? It’s Me, @, then pushed the band’s sound into stranger climes with an inflection of experimental electronic production. Though a considerable shift, it too was a development that emerged organically. A track they’d made together, ‘Odor In The Court’, had come with “this new weird energy”, says Filipczak, that was cross-pollinating with the off-kilter harmonies and subtle melodies of what they’d already established. “It felt like @, but from a new angle. And then that happened four more times with [the eventual EP’s] other tracks.”
Their next album, currently in the finishing stages, will be their first for 4AD. Signing to the label is a capstone, of course, but also something that @ appear to be taking in their stride. Their progression in status means that “a lot of people around us in music are also seeing the possibility of getting onto labels as being more in reach than it was previously,” says Rose.
The organic nature of @’s steady growth should not, however, bely the graft that underpins it. There is a characterisation of the group that sometimes emerges, “that it seems like things just kind of happen, or that opportunities just come up without us looking for them,” says Filipczak. “But I think something that gets missed is that we were both in the DIY music scene, working really hard on projects for many, many years before we started this project.” He has been playing the guitar and pursuing music since he was 11, while Rose – aside from earlier brushes with school choirs and bands – has been performing since her late teens; her debut show was an open mic at a pizza joint, where she pivoted last minute from the Cat Power song she’d been preparing to a self-penned composition. “There’s an element of consistency and dedication and hard work that gets left out of the narrative a little bit,” Filipczak continues.
It’s not so much that a cult following and a contract with a prestigious label simply happened to them, Rose points out, rather that “we’ve just never approached making music with the mindset of chasing that kind of success.” It is their dogged dedication to the act of creation itself that is now paying dividends, their ability to maximise what’s possible from whatever hands they’re dealt along the way, rather than blind luck. During that initial remote back and forth, for instance, they were able to find opportunity within the pandemic. For Filipczak, whose work up to that point had gravitated towards the experimental noise music of many of his peers, working in relative isolation “neutralised pressure in a social sense. [Before] I was feeling socially bound to making a certain type of art that wasn’t vulnerable – I had this songwriter side of me that I had repressed, but during Covid it didn’t matter what would sound good at a basement show. It just mattered what I wanted to hear out of my speakers.”
Rose, by contrast, says that lockdown allowed her to delve deeper into an established way of creating. @’s music has more in common with her solo project Brittle Brian than it does with Filipczak’s roots in punk and noise, both reaping the benefits of her slow and deliberate creative approach. “I’m not necessarily too previous with having a take sound perfect, but something that has always been a feature of my process is that I make a lot of mistakes, and that I’m very particular,” she says. “Stone is someone who’ll sit down and make composites of different takes, but I kind of like just getting it all in one take all the way through, and sometimes that takes many hours.” The relative isolation of home recording allows her to avoid the temporal pressures that such a process might bring up in a traditional studio. “There’s an ease to being able to just sit privately at your computer and record with your own microphones,” she continues, “and I think it can also lend itself to a certain sonic messiness that I think is charming, or useful sometimes.”
The significant tonal shift between Mind Palace Music and its follow-up experimental EP Are You There God? It’s Me, @ can also be viewed as an example not only of the duo’s ability to roll with the natural evolution of their sound, but of that deep creative drive. They were acutely aware, even at this early stage, of setting out their stall as musicians who cannot be pigeon-holed, seeking to get ahead of any future dismissals of @ as merely an acoustic folk project. ‘Soul Hole’, for instance, a woozy slice of hyperpop eccentricity, “is almost a silly track,” says Filipczak. Its manic animated video, featuring @ as giant worms, only ups the sense of weirdness, setting it in the ‘Car World’ parallel universe of the artist William Banks – where, according to the basics of a sprawling lore, the native species have arms where their heads should be, and are suffering under the rule of an alien species of human-headed invertebrates. “We wanted to be able to do that under our moniker, and not have it be perceived as a joke,” Filipczak continues. “If we had done a bunch of acoustic albums that stuck close to the Mind Palace formula, and then released a song like that, it would have felt very different than if we built that level of variety into our discography early on. I think we’ve also both enjoyed artists who do stuff like that, where they have their LPs, but then also their EPs that are like a B plot that gives you other perspective into them as artists.” He cites Animal Collective, for instance.
With that said, Rose also points out that “there was not too much intention” to the EP’s change of tone. “It was genuinely just an experiment.” At @’s core is still a desire to let their sound evolve as it may – it’s what they do with those evolutions that counts – in this case, an instinctive move towards stranger songs can also be the laying down of a foundational creative marker. In a way, it mirrors the push and pull between directness and drift at the heart of their songs themselves, something that will be intensified further on their forthcoming 4AD debut. “It’s more similar to the first record, but more fleshed out,” says Rose, “but only because we’ve been playing these songs with the bare bones arrangement, and sometimes with the large band for the better part of a year.” They’re darker in places, reflecting the fact that “we both had some difficult things happen to us – nothing super intense, but you know, life happens,” as Rose puts it, “so it made sense melody-wise to move in that direction,” although there is also, as Filipczak adds, “a theme of hopefulness to counterbalance.”
Though it is now, they point out, several years since they’ve worked entirely remotely – they currently live 20 minutes down the road from one another in Philadelphia and can write and rehearse in person – it feels notable that they’re still sticking to a minimalist recording set-up, declining to take advantage of the professional studio opportunities that their signing to 4AD could easily afford them. “Home recording is like a conversation between you and your creative vision, very directly and with no mediation,” Filipczak points out. “If you throw in an engineer it becomes a performance, which is positive sometimes – I think that having that attention and pressure is what drives a lot of great live performances – but if you’re trying to create something that feels very resonant to what your creative vision is, it can feel more authentic and achievable to just mix and engineer yourself.” The trade-off, of course, is the technical limitation imposed by a setup of just laptops, a couple of microphones, and small interfaces. @ realise, however, that there is beauty to be found in pushing against narrow confinements, redoubling your creative efforts in order to fill every last nook.
@ perform at this year’s Green Man, which takes place from 14 to 17 August in Bannau Brycheiniog, Wales. For details ann the full lineup, click here.
