Spotlight On... Idiogram

Lesley Crawford (piano, keys), Ali Gillies (bass), Ali Kilpatrick (guitar) and Keith Kirkwood (drums) make up East Lothian band Idiogram. The post-prog outfit are set to release their exceptional debut album, Reunion of Broken Parts, this Saturday (22 Mar) with a not-to-be-missed show at The Caves in celebration. Bringing together myraid genres and inspirations, their debut is worth getting excited about. We catch up with the band to find out more.

First of all, we’d love to know a little bit more about you – when and how did the four of you meet, what sparked your musical journey together, and where does the name come from?

Crawford: I suppose you could say I was the instigator! I knew Keith from kicking around the Edinburgh music scene when we both played in other bands, Ali Kilpatrick and I were on the same university course many, many years ago, and I met Ali Gillies through working together on inclusive music projects. I had played in a lot of bands where there was a main songwriter and I was really interested in exploring what would happen if there just wasn’t one and instead it was a group of equals creating something together. The idea of giving up creative control terrified me… and, perversely, I quite like doing things that terrify me.

The rest of the band are all people I was really excited to work with. Truthfully, I approached them because I believe they are all excellent musicians and thought they would all do something musically different to what I might do, crucially I also thought we could all work well together as people. We started with just a broad musical ballpark, a collection of musical things and elements we liked. One of our very first meet-ups was actually us sitting in Keith’s living room passing each other the aux cord and sharing music that we liked!

Kilpatrick: We’ve a bit of a fascination with words, usually powered by late night trips down Wikipedia rabbit holes. Often the meaning isn’t as interesting to us as the way a word sounds, or what images it conjures up. Sometimes they become song titles, we cycled through a good few before we settled on Idiogram!

When it comes to your sound as Idiogram, your album brings together a whole plethora of genres – who or what inspires each of you musically, and what’s the process like when it comes to fleshing out a song from start to finish? Does it change from song to song, or is there a formula that over time you now find yourself sticking to?

Crawford: I think as individuals we are all really curious, and interested in exploring and learning in general – amongst the business chat, our group WhatsApp is littered with articles spanning all sorts from the process of reforming ham to the understanding of quantum particles. That same level of curiosity is applied to music too; we all have a natural musical home somewhere on the spectrum of genres but we’re always excited to expand our knowledge of what is out there.

We musically borrow from a lot of places and bring them into our own sphere. Nothing is off the table for us really, we’re not really interested in restricting ourselves for the sake of a neat label. The music we’re making is really a reflection of our love of exploration and embracing the things that speak to us… and our rejection of the idea that any type of music should be done any one way. 

Our writing process is highly collaborative, usually the way we work is that someone brings an idea to the table and we all build and mould it together. We try not to be too precious about our own ideas, it's amazing how two people can hear things completely differently and we really try to embrace that as part of our process. Probably the best description of our approach would be ‘yes, and…’. It takes us to some pretty far-off places but somehow we always manage to make it home.

Gillies: To continue that thread a little, I think our ‘formula’ comes from being a sort of round-robin dictatorship, rather than a democracy per se. When one of us brings an idea to the rest, whether it’s the start of a brand new piece or a solution for a hole we’ve dug ourselves into, we tend to try and refine it with some tenacity. But, crucially, if after that it turns out to be the wrong idea in the wrong place we are also good at letting go lightly. We have a folder full of these not-quite fragments (the ‘Noodle Bowl’). I’m sure at least some of them will prove to be the right thing for future songs.

For the most part the album is instrumental, but a few samples do feature – it's most notable on Chromosphere / Tidal Disruption, which sounds like it’s been taken from an old space mission transmission. What can you tell us about the song and sample?

Kilpatrick: Chromosphere itself is quite unusual on the album, in that I wrote all the parts and presented it to the band as a full piece, rather than it being such a collaborative effort; they decided it was worth pursuing further as a ‘band’ thing. That demo was called ‘you will not go to space today’ (based on an xkcd comic!) and that then inspired all the atmospheric samples that sit underneath the music.

Crawford: Yeah, Ali K presented us with this piece he had written and we were all in immediate agreement that it was something we’d love to work on. Tidal Disruption came out of some ideas we’d previously explored and not really committed to – the original inspiration for that piece (not that I’m sure you’d detect it now) was actually one of Mendelssohn’s Venetian Gondola Songs. It's buried beneath Massive Attack-inspired synths and wailing guitars but it is still in there!

Gillies: The samples are mined from the audio from the NASA Apollo shuttle missions, all of which is freely available. I tried to strike a balance between serious mission talk, more conversational exchanges, and the banal. Countdowns and handovers between monitoring stations act as cues for musical changes, while chat about coffee and donuts and office whinging caught on a hot mic are lurking in there if you want to listen out for it. The background hisses and hums are important too. Actual atmosphere caught on tape!

I love how explosive the song becomes in the second half with everything escalating and cluster notes being smashed out on the keys alongside tricky time signatures – what’s it like to play a song like this, one that’s so changeable, in a live setting?

Gillies: It’s a wild ride, this one. We are at risk. To properly nail that feeling of unravelling chaos we have to be very precise while attempting to relax as much as we can. A lot of our recent rehearsal time has been focussed on getting this bit just right.

Crawford: Playing this song, and indeed the whole album, really keeps us on our toes. We perform everything live and we employ liberal and creative use of technology to get us there. In many ways the live performance is as much a technical challenge as it is a musical one – there are lots of pedals to tap and buttons to press. We really need to trust ourselves and each other to pull a lot of this off, some good old fashioned practice doesn’t hurt either… 

The artwork for the album also feels like it could directly be linked to this song, a beautiful sculptural piece by artist Katie Hallam. I’d love to know more about how this collaboration came about and what was it that drew you to Katie’s work?

Crawford: We spent a lot of time looking up artists and trying to find something that we really felt resonated with us and our music. The second we came across Katie’s work I think we were all blown away. A lot of the things that she is exploring in her art are similar to what we are exploring in music; the interaction of organic and digital, embracing error and glitch, and bringing these digital ideas into physical spaces, setting them against landscapes – juxtaposition with belonging. It's really phenomenal work so we were beyond thrilled when she agreed to create something for our artwork. We loved so many of her pieces that we actually ended up using two, the second of which you can find in the internal panels of our CDs. We’re really excited to have her at our album launch too where she’ll be selling some prints.

We loved receiving our ‘broken part’ specimen (specimen #20) in the post the other week too – what was the idea behind this? And will there be further fun pieces like this available for fans around the release of the record?

Kirkwood: Like so many other things to do with this band it was a group effort, but credit needs to go to our PR man James Coutts for this idea of sending out a unique and intriguing item in order to stand out from the crowd a bit. We all sort of cringed when he suggested it, but after a bit of thought we came up with the idea of sending these wee bismuth crystals that form geometrically and have a beautiful iridescent sheen. We felt they really tied in with both the artwork and our latent nerdiness! 

Gillies: Immediately after sending them out we were sorry we hadn’t made more, so that's what we did! We’ll have a very limited selection of them for sale at the album launch which will come with a download code. I think this is the sort of thing we’ll potentially do more of in the future, I think we quietly enjoy the conceptual side of all of this too.

To celebrate the album, you’re playing a special launch show at The Caves on Saturday – what can people expect on the night?

Kirkwood: Beauty, chaos, weirdness and joy, in roughly equal measure! We’re playing the album top to bottom with live coded visuals from Sam Healy, which we hope will combine with the music to provide a properly absorbing experience. Sly Dig and Matilda will be on support, with Farhad Ahmed providing visuals for the first half. Their sound worlds are distinct from us (and each other) but we feel like their tendency to defy easy categorisation made them the perfect choices to get the audience primed for the journey this album takes you on.

Crawford: Accessibility has been high on our list of priorities when planning this gig. Although there is a small lip at the entrance, we chose The Caves due to its power chair accessible route from entrance to stage. Concession and carer tickets were a must, and we have reserved space at the front for the wheelchair users we know are coming.

And what does the rest of the year look like for Idiogram – what's next?

Gillies: Writing funding applications, probably! We have a mad idea or two in the pipes. However, reaching this point has been something of an all consuming goal both mentally and financially. A short period of recharging and reconnecting with the bits of our life that aren’t this album is in order. Much of our immediate future is unwritten, or at least unplanned in detail. We’d love it if the collaboration with Sam wasn’t a one-off. His visual storytelling has this transformative effect on the music so a few more gigs with that wonderful evolving world behind us would be great.

Kilpatrick: As Ali mentioned, we’ve a lot of musical ideas that didn’t make the album, so I think we’re all looking forward to returning to the ‘noodle bowl’ and flexing that part of our creativity again too: there’s more to come, for sure.

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Reunions of Broken Parts is released on 22 Mar; Idiogram play The Caves, Edinburgh, 22 Mar

Follow Idiogram on Instagram @idiogramband