Lucid Dreaming: Patterns' hallucinatory pop

Patterns frontman Ciaran McAuley’s back is turned The Skinny and his bandmate Laurence Radford, as he concentrates, instead, on a Moroccan-style terrine. For the vocalist of this Manchester-based four-piece, cooking in his own kitchen is a pleasantly contrasting experience to his first forays into culinary cuisine after graduating from Manchester University. “I worked in this hotel, but it wasn’t really run as one,” he recalls. “It had an unofficial halfway house in it for mental patients; the government hadn’t been able to provide accommodation for people, so they’d pay the hotel to put them up. You’d get some bizarre people; this old lady would cook her own frozen meatballs in the kitchen every day even though she wasn’t supposed to. The owner also owned a brothel and would never reveal his own name – he was simply referred to as ‘the Doctor.’ Apparently he had a doctorate in psychology and so used this to manipulate staff into working without pay.”

It sounds like an almost Lynch-ian construct in its bizarreness and, if Patterns don’t quite delve as deeply into the dark underbelly of the human condition as the Mulholland Drive director, they certainly share a similar desire to inhabit an otherworldliness through art. (We laugh as Radford jokes, “Is food a way of not becoming too detached from the world because our music’s so ethereal?” But he might have a point.)

After nearly two years, the group – McAuley on vocals, sampler and synths and Radford on guitar are joined by Alex Hillhouse on bass and drummer Jamie Lynch – finally release debut album Waking Lines this month. It’s a record that, in its gentle conflict of pop sensibility and amorphous explorations, attempts to surpass the feeling of time and place. “I almost don’t like albums that feel like they were recorded in a real space,” McAuley explains. “I like albums where things sound quite unnatural and don’t feel temporal, and not like something you’d just get from listening to live music. Our album isn’t about being in a physical space.”

Familiar grounding comes in the earworm hooks and immediately satisfying choruses of This Haze and Blood, but they are the weight that the album proceeds to alleviate itself of. A dream-pop record in the classic sense of the Cocteau Twins’ Treasure or Slowdive’s Just for a Day, its intentions are to leave the orthodox behind and evoke a more intangible experience. McAuley admits, however, that he was wary of leaving too much human emotion behind during this process.

“I saw an interview with Washed Out after his second album where he said he’d found it totally detached listening back. We didn’t want that; you can make a dream-pop album – or whatever you want to term it – while connecting emotionally with the audience, even if at the same time you’re not delivering them a storyline.”

Washed Out is a telling reference: the rich, layered drones lurking beneath Patterns’ more defined melodies hint at influences away from British shoegaze music and more towards the Technicolor sounds of hypnagogic America. McAuley talks enthusiastically about Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion – he uses the same Roland SP-404 sampler as Panda Bear – and Patterns fully emerged in 2010, just as Manchester’s alternative live scene was beginning to overcome its obsession with ‘authenticity’ manifest as testosterone-driven, beer-swilling, ‘proper’ haircuts and instruments.

"Our album isn’t about being in a physical space” – Ciaran McAuley

“It felt like over [a period of] around half a year we stopped playing terrible shows with lads with Oasis haircuts,” he remembers. Fans of late DIY indie disco Underachievers Please Try Harder, which was more likely to play Pavement than The Stone Roses, they found kindred spirits in night founder and future agent Dave Bassinder. With promoters Now Wave also on the up, more open-minded, often trans-Atlantic sounds were becoming de rigeur. “Just as we were starting to develop our own ideas around live electronica, the scene opened up and people became really interested in seeing it,” McAuley says. An EP followed by singles Induction and Blood during 2011 and 2012 exposed Patterns to an audience beyond the Northwest: championed by Steve Lamacq on 6music, they played Bestival; locally, they headlined a rare gig to have taken place at the John Rylands Library on Deansgate.

Then, for a long time, little happened – as the band had locked themselves away to write. Music as geographical competition is, thankfully, largely redundant in 2014; but as peers including MONEY, PINS and Ghost Outfit all put out their own debut records, were there any tinges of jealousy? “It was frustrating,” admits McAuley, “but because of how long it took on our part, not because of what others were doing.” Radford agrees: “You need to be careful about comparing yourself to other bands. As soon as you start getting competitive about release dates you’ll start rushing and never have a finished product you’re happy with.”

Part of Waking Lines’ delay came down to the usual mundane processes of the music industry. A lot of it, though, came down to the band’s respect of the art form and the heritage that comes with releasing a debut album. Says McAuley, “We really wanted to be careful and write something we were totally behind. We could only do that by doing it at home, piece by piece. There’s a psychological hurdle with producing a first record because you build it up so much. It’s an important cultural institution. I’ve learnt loads overcoming that.”

Fortunately, that gestation period has resulted in optimal results, and the record is as fully realised as the band could’ve hoped for. Both McAuley and Radford describe it as “headphone music,” and to that end it was recorded more in the spirit of a bedroom producer – albeit by four of them. Each member wrote in isolation, ideas fizzing between email inboxes, McAuley layering tracks in his room. It’s a way of working that seems at odds with the album’s warm, cohesive feel – “but that’s in keeping with an outdated idea of the ‘rock dream’, where music’s only ‘authentic’ when played by a bunch of guys in a room,” McAuley retorts. “There’s so much electronica that’s able to express complex and human emotions in a natural way. There’s absolutely no way we should have this old weird conception of a band.”

McAuley and Radford met studying Philosophy, and wrote their dissertations on the existentialist Martin Heidegger. Though Waking Lines isn’t specifically about that or other philosophical theory, its broad themes of consciousness, late-night hallucinations and altered states does, as McAuley admits, “fit into the psychedelic music canon, and theories around identity and memory are all part of that... They’ve informed our choice to be non-linear and indirect lyrically as well as what we’re doing regards mood.”

Instead, the album plots an undefinable yet strongly emotive journey, beginning in the familiar before plunging into the ether, re-emerging with aptly titled closing ballad, Climbing Out. “That song’s like climbing out into the real world,” explains McAuley. “You’re taken into the space, then you’re brought back out and progress to the next thing, whatever that may be… It was the final song written for the record, so acts as a nice bookend, really.”