Devil's music: An interview with worriedaboutsatan
Manchester-based electronic duo worriedaboutsatan may well have made their finest album to date with Blank Tape – here they tell us about location, the political climate and working with documentarian Adam Curtis
It’s a bitterly cold Monday night, at the start of a winter that can’t seem to wait to get going. In the back room of The Castle pub in Manchester, meanwhile, worriedaboutsatan are giving a searing preview of their latest album, Blank Tape, working as if stoking a furnace. Now completely in their element within the aesthetic and language of electronic music, Gavin Miller and Thomas Ragsdale shift through different movements of skittering drum machine patterns, breakbeats, sub bass and oblique guitar/vocal samples that range from the unnerving to the sublime; equally suited to a late-night festival set as to tonight’s more studious atmosphere.
Once the room empties, The Skinny sits down with the pair to work out how they ended up here. Emerging from the post-rock scene in Leeds over ten years ago, they soon set out on a divergent path.
“I think we had a idea of what we wanted to do when we started,” says Ragsdale, “but as we made the music you realise, ‘Oh – maybe the music we made doesn’t fit in with the Sigur Rós, Explosions In The Sky crowd; it might fit in with this crowd that found us and adopted us.' There’s no disappointment with it, it just been a bit of a side step from post-rock to techno.”
With time, their marriage of guitars and computers has been met with a bit more understanding, Miller explains: “It’s nice we’re not that weird fucking band that shows up at metal nights.”
The Manchester influence
An alternative creative climate, as well as some personal circumstances, drew the band away from Leeds to Manchester six years ago. “We kept coming to Manchester to play gigs or go to gigs, we just kind of felt really at home here,” says Ragsdale.
“Not to diss Leeds, because Leeds is amazing and we spent many happy years there,” Miller continues, “but I think for us it got a bit too concerned with all the lad rock-y stuff. There was loads for dance, but it was the big names; there were no underground parties or anything, but we were doing all these cool things in Manchester.” They do agree, however, that Leeds has greatly upped its game in the intervening years.
Though the grittier, industrial surroundings may have had a tangible impact on their output (“more urgency, harder”), this may all change again with both Ragsdale and Miller having recently moved back east to more secluded regions of West Yorkshire. “We’ll see if the folk album comes out!” jokes Ragsdale. “We’ve not written anything yet since we moved, so we’ll see what happens.”
But no doubt, the band will remain busy in their new settings, maintaining their form for relentless productivity; producing solo projects, music for film and television and running their own label This Is It Forever. Having originally started the imprint to release their own music, things got “a bit crazy” with a lot of manual labour going into everyday operations and trying to get the word out. “There’s only a certain number of magazines out there, or websites,” says Ragsdale. “I find it really annoying when a DIY band with a new album get bumped for a Kanye West news item.”
“It’s tough but it’s nice because you’re in control of everything, but it only goes as far as the effort that goes in,” adds Miller. “I think it’s worth it, we have the freedom to talk about releasing because we’re not under contract, it’s just us. It’s nice that we have that flexibility.”
HyperNormalisation: Working with Adam Curtis
Having carved a reasonably rewarding niche from synching and soundtracks, worriedaboutsatan may have reached more ears than usual this year via the inclusion of their music in Adam Curtis’ iPlayer special documentary HyperNormalisation, for which Miller was the music supervisor, continuing a working relationship fostered since Miller interviewed Curtis for Drowned in Sound in 2011.
In weaving together apparently disparate topics such as fiscal crisis in New York City, Lebanese civil war, hierarchies within cyberspace and Muammar Gaddafi’s malleable role as a global figure, Curtis shows a world in which reality can no longer be fully comprehended, resulting in the ‘post-truth’ society, run by corporate wealth and kept in stasis by immovable political institutions; a situation to which any alternative cannot be imagined.
It’s easy to see how the complexity and overwhelming paradoxical dread of the ideas being presented in Curtis’ films are complemented by worriedaboutsatan’s music – as Miller says, “It’s got to have a certain mood or atmosphere. I think we’ve always had that kind of cinematic, weird melancholic thing and I think [Curtis] really digs that.
“He juxtaposes pretty brutal stuff with quite chirpy music because there’s an underlying weirdness about how chirpy that music is, and he taps into that. Putting one thing over the other creates something weirder; he understands how bittersweet everything is.”
Is the world a more worrying place than when they started?
“You see the news and it is kind of worrying,” says Miller. “You see the march of the far-right... I guess it’s always been there, it’s always been bubbling under the surface and now it’s just come to the fore. You hope now it’s just going to pop and just go away.”
“Tempers are flying everywhere,” add Ragsdale. “On those groups like the Christian Party, if you go on and not argue, but just state a different point of view, there are proper death threats like, ‘I’ll come and find you, you pussy-ass lefty and I’ll beat you to the ground.’” The reality of the situation may be different to the character implied by the threats, however: “He could in the pub, he could just be a normal guy.”
On the subject of Jo Cox, the Labour MP murdered in her constituency in the week leading up the EU referendum, Miller explains, “It put a lot of things into perspective, for something like that to happen on our doorstep. You just think, ‘For fuck’s sake, how have we got there? That’s insane.’” But, refusing to lose heart, he adds: “You’ve just got to plough on and hope that people come to their senses and realise that it’s not the way to be.”
It wouldn’t suit Ragsdale and Miller to be ground down, and suitably next year sees their biggest schedule of touring, festivals and video work to date. “We’ll just do what we’ve always done and see what happens,” Miller says. Just like the past, the future’s a foreign country too, and worriedaboutsatan will no doubt keep doing things differently.
Blank Tape is out now via This Is It Forever
Catch worriedaboutsatan on tour in February 2017, including Bradford (Fuse Art Space, 13 Feb), Glasgow (Glad Café, 14 Feb) and Leeds (Wharf Chambers, 17 Feb)